


once more with feeling

by sarsaparillia



Series: thunderbird and whale [1]
Category: Oxenfree
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6530842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarsaparillia/pseuds/sarsaparillia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex, stumbling through the time-stream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. like a bird on a wire

—

.

.

.

.

.

As for me, I'm—

[— _rewind; you're not allowed to forget, alex. you know that. try again_.]

—

She doesn't get to have them both.

It must be one of the laws of the universe, or something. If Michael lives, all Jonas is ever going to be is a friend. If Michael dies, well, Michael's dead, and that's not a state of the union that Alex is about to be okay with. When her brother died the first time, things broke. They just. They broke.

And Alex is so tired of things breaking.

So: she doesn't get to have them both. She gets Clarissa waking her up at obscene hours when she crawls over her legs in through the window so that she doesn't trip the door alarms. She gets Ren with his arm around Nona's shoulders rattling off facts about roosters because he's been on an agriculture kick and Ren can't stop talking if his life depends on it. She gets Nona thumbing through prom dress catalogues, kind of grinning out of the corner of her mouth. She gets to have Jonas, his fingers curled around the xbox controller while he lounges on the couch. She gets to have Michael, messy-haired and grinning in the kitchen sunlight and _alive_.

But she doesn't get to have them both.

She's not sure what kind of trade-off it is. There are days she wakes up and can't move for the sickness of it. But Michael is Michael and it's—it's not like she was so great at functioning without him, okay. She wasn't. She really, really wasn't.

Because whatever else Edwards Island is, it's consequences are long-reaching.

The reset happens anywhere from six months to a year; it just depends how good she's been about remembering. It hangs over her head, every interaction tainted with it; some days, Alex thinks that not knowing was so much better, because at least then she wasn't always flinching back from the press of Jonas' hand on her shoulder.

At least when she didn't remember, it didn't hurt so much.

The ghosts don't seem to like that, though. That she didn't remember that they put her there must have rankled, or that she didn't recognize them for what they were right from the beginning when she'd already lived this so many times. The earliest resets are still blurry, and Alex only knows those happened because they _had_ to have happened. It's the way they talk, _you did_ and _you have_ and _you will_ , like all of time is an infinite loop and somewhere along the way, she did something that fundamentally broke it.

(Ha, broke. Like it's not breaking all the time.)

She remembers every reset, now. The press of the radio in her pocket is a familiar thing, hiding its blue-green frequencies in the heavy lining of Michael's coat. It doesn't record, but it's always good for eerie little jingles when she's wandering around town. The echoes of it are a reminder that all of this, all of it, it could be gone any second.

She looks at her brother and her other brother, and wonders where she went wrong.

Because the thing is, she's played this game. She knows how this goes. It's not like she hasn't lived it so many times she can't even count, anymore. It's not like there's anything she hasn't said. It's not like there's anything she hasn't _tried_.

The outcome is always the same.

Michael comes back to life, Jonas isn't her step-brother, and the radio still plays.

(One reset she chucked the thing over the railing of the ferry, just to see if she could. The reset was so jarring that her head hurt for days. She hasn't tried it since; it's not worth the headache.)

"Jesus, Alex, you're spacing out again."

"Do I ever do anything else?" she shoots back. It's sometime in August, late summer heat dripping thick and sweaty down her spine, and the sun's been down for hours. She told him that she was the kind of girl who passed out at eleven with her hand still in the chip bowl, and maybe once upon a time, she was. "God, put that thing out, it _smells_ like cancer."

Jonas laughs, sharp and hacking. He puts out the smoke on the railing, all the knobs and knuckles of his hands contorting with the movement of it. It leaves a black mark against the pale metal, like a scar. Alex only has a second to stare at it before he wipes it away, sends the stub sailing down into the gloom below. There are fairy lights strung all up over the backyard, but the glow doesn't reach Alex's bedroom, and the only indication that there's a party going on at all is the spill of laughter out the front door and the faint _thud_ of the bass up through the floor.

Michael always did love a good party. She can hear him shouting with Ren about—something. Who even knows, these days, the engineering shit her brother can spout off on command makes her head spin, and Ren's no better. They're the worst closed-circuit feedback loop, honestly, and they only get _worse_ when Jonas ends up in the mix. They are every bad joke she's ever stifled a laugh at, times like _eighty million_.

God, Alex loves them so absurdly.

It's Jonas' elbow in her ribs that brings her back.

"You did it again," he says, not unkindly. "Twice in ten minutes. I think that's a record."

"Shut up," Alex says. Her lips twitch, threatening to curl into a smile. It feels like she hasn't smiled in a year. "Like you're any better, you totally drifted off earlier when Nona was talking about applications. How's _that_ for spacing out?"

" _Ow_ ," he deadpans, "my feeling."

"Your feeling?"

"Last time I checked, I only had the one," Jonas grins out of the corner of his mouth. His teeth are a flash in the dark, and for a sickening crunch of a half-second, Alex thinks _this is it, we're going to reset, you're going to forget me_ —

But the ghosts are quiet, no static as her vision hazes over and screeches like a badly-rewound tape. In the interim she flinches, goes silent. It goes on long enough to catch Jonas' attention, and he frowns down at her, eyebrows pulling together.

"Do you ever stop thinking about it, Alex?" he asks, so painfully gentle. He doesn't even have to specify what _it_ is, because it's late and they're both long past pretending. Senior year hasn't even started this go around. She thinks of his eyes lit paper-lantern red, _we're trapped in another loop_ , the hopeless tug of his mouth before the blast door like he'd give anything to have two more seconds with his mother even if it doomed them all. She couldn't blame him for it then. She can't blame him for it now.

"No," Alex says. She closes her eyes. "Never."

He doesn't tell her that she has to let it go, that it's going to eat her alive if she doesn't. The island is still too close, and even if he doesn't know everything, he knows enough. Instead, he slips his arms around her shoulders to tug her into the curve of his body. Alex goes without a fuss. In the dark red wash of her closed eyelids, it's easier to trust him than it should be.

"Hey, Alex…" Jonas says. It feels like a long time later, but time is weird and elastic when Alex is involved. The sky is that pale blue-green it turns just before the indigo of true night sets in along the fuzzy line of the horizon where the ocean and the atmosphere merge. No stars, but there never are, anymore.

"What?"

"Have you ever been in love with anyone?"

Alex blinks up at him. Something churns in her stomach, a low pulsing _warning_ , but it's not a warning she understands. She understands blaring panic and clawing horror, but this creeping paralysis is something else entirely. He's just looking at her, eyebrows pulled together as he kind of frowns. It's an intensive study, and she thinks of time loops, a soccer ball, bringing dead brothers back to life. Truth or slap on the beach, Ren and Nona holding hands, bomb shelters and blinking lights.

Michael and Jonas. Jonas and Michael.

(Oh god, she knows she doesn't get to have them both.)

"Don't ask me that," Alex says, and means it. This isn't fair. It isn't _fair_. Of all the things the ghosts have given and taken, this is the ugliest. It wrenches all the dark and sticky places inside of her, turns all her guts into knots. "For real, don't."

Jonas ducks a little closer, and suddenly _fair_ doesn't matter anymore.

"What are you doing," she says. It's not a question.

"I don't know." It's not an answer. She doesn't remember the green in his eyes. That's different.

"You should maybe work on that," Alex's breath hitches in her throat, the linoleum siding of the house digging into her back. It sticks like skin against leather and Jonas is so close, so _close_ , his arm pressed to the house in a curve above her head and bent down so that they're face to face, nose to nose. God, he's been brother and best friend but never this, never _this_ and she hasn't let herself think about it for so many reasons, so many _good_ reasons _because_ — "You should definitely, y'know, work on that."

"How am I supposed to work on it? You're always running away," he says, gaze darting back and forth across her face. He's watching her like she's something wild, and he hesitates before continuing. "You haven't stopped running since the island."

Well, he's not wrong.

Her hands are fisted in his shirt. It's a conscious effort to unclench them, to let him go. It's fucked up, but she doesn't have a script for this. Alex has lived a hundred lifetimes since she tuned into the source all that time ago, but this isn't a song she knows.

She's forgotten how to be spontaneous. One more thing to add to the list, the deconstruction of herself lost in bits and pieces and stubby cut-off radio waves. Teal hair and freckles and her brother's old coat: Alex has forgotten how to be anything else.

"I love you," she exhales it like a secret, because it's true. She drops her forehead to his chest, shakes her head very slowly. She loves him, she loves him, she loves him. Sharper and harder and faster than Ren or Nona or Clarissa or even Michael, Michael who she can't look at some days because she remembers what it was like when he was dead and no one else has a clue. There are several lifetimes of grief packed inside of her, all in cups of coffee and static crackle and eternal loops of time, and Alex can't—Alex _can't_.

"I love you, too," Jonas says. There is such resignation in his face. "Sorry. I shouldn't have—are you okay?"

 _Yeah_ , Alex says, tries to say, thinks because she can't actually get the words out, _I'm fine_.

But she's not fine, and she's not _been_ fine, and she's not going to _be_ fine. Even if—even if she kisses him, now, lets him kiss her, allows the thing that's brewed between them since the beginning to erupt into flames, it's not going to last. The ghosts will reset everything, and she'll end up right back at the start. It will be Edwards Island all over again, only the next run will have the added dimension of new memory. Déjà vu, unspooling in reverse.

And Jonas _won't remember_.

"Alex?" he asks. "You in there?"

Alex nods into his shoulder. It's just—the words, they're not the right ones, she won't be able to get them out. She just needs a minute, that's all, a minute or an hour or a day or a year or, god, a lifetime, _two_ lifetimes. How do people do this without freaking out? How do they—? _How_?

"Take your time. I'll just get comfortable," Jonas says. She thinks he's kidding. He sounds like he's kidding. But maybe he's not, because his arms come up to curl around her waist and he just holds onto her. This isn't new; they're both physical people, and Alex is prone to looping herself around the people she cares about. But for that second-minute-hour- _lifetime_ that she needs, here in the lee of Jonas' body, she's sort of, almost, tentatively okay.

"You'll—it'll change things," Alex says.

"I think we've lived through worse," Jonas says.

Well, Alex can't deny that. She scrunches up her face in his shoulder, trying to find an argument that isn't _what if it messes everything up even worse than it already is_. It's not an argument that makes sense to anyone but her, and besides, it's not like it's going to matter in the long run. They _have_ lived through worse, and eventually the ghosts will want to play again. The reset hangs heavy around her shoulders.

"We'll still be friends, right?" Alex asks his shoulder, muffled. She's got strands of hair in her mouth, and they taste like nothing at all. She almost misses metallic chemical burn of the bleach. "Even if it sucks?"

"It's not gonna suck, Als," he says, very softly.

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

Alex searches through herself for courage, that bright-edged flame that keeps her going even when nothing makes sense. Even when the ghosts have taken Clarissa and dropped her body out a two-story window, even when Ren's drowning, even when Michael's dead. It kept her going through the worst night of her life, relived a hundred thousand times, and it keeps her going now. She swallows back bile, and pulls away to look up at him.

His face is the same as it always is, kind-eyed and crooked-grinned. There's the line of his nose, the cut of his jaw, and they are all things that Alex knows as well as she knows her own face. Jonas isn't a surprise, except when he is. He's not wearing the beanie, and his hair is all sticky-out all over the place.

"You need a haircut," Alex manages.

" _You_ need a dye job," Jonas says. "Blonde doesn't suit you."

"Wow, rude," she tells him, and tilts her head up to catch his lips.

For one glorious second, nothing happens at all. Nothing happens but lips against lips, and her heart leaps in her throat because maybe this is it, maybe they're out, maybe she gets to _have_ this, Michael laughing downstairs with his arm around Clarissa, everyone she cares about alive and fine and maybe she gets to have them both, maybe it's going to be _okay_ this time.

Alex gasps, pulls in one great gulp of air.

"Jonas, I—"

[ _SCCCTCCHH_ — _please, alex. like it would be so easy. again._ _ **again**_ _. SCTCCHHHHCKKK_ —]

The breath goes out of her.

Alex sinks down to the hardwood of her bedroom. Her knees _pop_. It's barely a sound at all beneath the hissing of her blood through her veins, midday sunlight sinking into her skin. Resets are always jarring, especially when she's not expecting them. She can still taste Jonas' mouth, all mint and ash.

"You know, I shouldn't be so surprised," Alex says, wearily, to no one in particular as she picks herself up off the floor. "You _would_ think this was funny."

The radio in her pocket crackles to life, and over the waves it comes:

Laughter.

—

.

.

.

.

.

 _tbc_.


	2. and in the decay

—

.

.

.

.

.

As for me, I'm—

[— _rewind; again, we said._ _ **again**_ _. do try to keep up, dear, time's a ticking!_ ]

—

She can't look at him.

Which, _unhelpful_ , Alex, this is your new step-brother and you should maybe not be such an asshole! But of course, he's only really her new step-brother for the next twelve hours, and then she'll wake up to Michael kneeling next to her with his hands in her hair and she'll start to cry because that's what always happens. And Jonas will be her friend, her _best_ friend, her other brother, because—

God, it's been half an hour, and she can still feel the dry press of his lips, ghost-soft and tingling. Can still feel the linoleum, sticky in the summer heat. Can still taste his stupid cigarette, ash and mint and every bad life decision she's ever made.

(It's been half an hour and a lifetime in between, anyway.)

And now she can't look at him.

"Hey," Jonas says. He's got his hands stuck in his pockets, shoulders turned in. Ren trots ahead, and this is a tune Alex already knows. "Can I talk to you?"

The words are all sharp in her throat, broken-glass edges digging into her windpipe. And Jesus, no matter what anyone says, blood doesn't taste like metal. It tastes like blood. It tastes like blood and it's in the back of Alex's throat, just blood and blood and blood, that angry red wash hot and wet. It's eight o'clock and the island looms shadows around them. _Oh, god, here we go again_.

She breathes through it. "Yeah, of course. What's up?"

"Look, I just—I just wanted to say thanks. You've been really… really cool, about this whole thing," he says. It takes everything inside of her not to mouth the words along with him; no matter what, Jonas is always Jonas. He's completely incapable of being anyone else.

"Don't worry about it," Alex tells him, doesn't think about the fact that she knows he hesitates before he kisses someone. The crinkle of his eyes. The slick edges of his teeth. "It's not a big deal."

"Still. Thanks."

She flops a shoulder up and down in a half-hearted shrug. She could say a lot of things; _the attic was already cleaned out_ or _what else would I even do_ or _don't mention it, no, really, don't_. She could tell him about Michael, about the ghosts, about the horrorshow that this night is going to become. She could tell him about the soccer ball. She could tell him about the Source.

God, she could tell him that she wants to kiss him again.

But she doesn't.

(The ghosts press close, and she wonders if this is going to be the rest of eternity: Maggie, Michael, Clarissa. Ren and Nona. Jonas. Jonas, Jonas, Jonas. And Alex herself, the only company with enough memory to fill a paper cup.)

"Seriously," Alex says instead. Sighs. "It's chill. We're square. I've got your back."

He looks like he's about to reply, actually opens his mouth a little (which, _weird_ , that's different, but whatever), but then Ren comes crashing back talking a mile a minute because honestly Ren has the worst sense of dramatic timing. It's relief and torture in equal measure, but there are some days where all Alex sees when she looks at him is the limp float of his arms in the water. Drown, drowning, drowned: just another loop, just another wave, just another ghost. He says something about being young enough to bathe together before society and puberty made it weird, and Alex thinks _yeah, that happened_ but also _I don't even remember it_.

It's so fucked _up_ , and it makes her wonder how much more the resets have taken from her. How much more they're _going_ to take. This is what's left: Michael's jacket and teal hair and the empty crackle of the radio. How much more does she have to lose?

Alex swallows hard. Tunes back in.

(As though she's ever doing anything else.)

Jonas looks out of place amidst the kitsch of Edwards Island's quaint little shops, all too-wide shoulders and awkward shuffle, but he matches Ren word for word and snip for snip. The banter between them is so familiar Alex almost catches herself humming along as the sky fades dusky-blue, too tired in her bones to interject. Ren likes Nona. Jonas is new. Clarissa isn't possessed. Michael's dead. This is the reset, and this is her life. Don't be weird.

 _Can't you be cool for five minutes_?

Haha, no. Not here. Not now. Not when she can still feel the hot sticky heat of the night before on her skin. Not when she can still taste that kiss. She licks her lips. Skin and salt. Jonas. Jonas, Jonas, Jonas.

Alex's muscles burn with the effort of basically climbing up and down a mountain. It's a good distraction from, well, _everything_.

Because then there's Clarissa's venom and Nona's sweet smile and the long empty beach before the wide, endless stretch of saltwater. The bonfire is all hungry tongues of flame to eat the night alive, the cooler full of beer. The ocean is a dull roar in the background. It starts all over again. Reset. Just another reset. Alex tastes blood and skin and salt in the back of her throat, and actually has to smile.

God, this whole thing would be funny if it weren't quite so sad.

There are delicate arcs of footprints in the sand where Nona and Clarissa have already walked. Alex ambles along them beneath the twinkle of stars in the sky, the very last vestiges of the day sinking beyond the horizon. She could wander the entire beach, and it would feel like no time had passed at all, because that's the way this works. Time only passes when the ghosts want it to. If there's anything that she has learned from this whole shindig, it's that time really isn't linear at all. She thinks of Michael. Maybe they'll have pancakes when they get out. Maybe they'll crawl into the local iHop, half dead and soaked and shaking, and order a huge stack to share—

"Hold on. Wait. Where—where are we?"

The world _tilts_.

Alex pivots, blinking, to stare at Jonas. He's gone very still, white in the face. He's looking down the beach to where the cave mouth opens like he's just—like he's just seen a ghost. Like he's just seen every ghost. Like déjà vu, the tight hot sickness in his throat that Alex lives with every single day.

Like he remembers it.

Oh, _fuck_.

"The beach," Nona's saying slowly. She's squinting at him a little bit from underneath her bangs, big dark eyes wary. "That place where people go to, y'know—"

"Drink and swim and fuck, and not get in trouble for it," Clarissa finishes for her, smirking, nothing but a red curl of lips and a red curl of hair. She's awful, venom and vitriol the only thing left inside of her. God, Alex despises her so much of the time.

"Stuff it," Alex cuts in, automatic.

"Oh, did the little one grow a _spine_ while—"

"I'm serious, Clarissa, stuff it. No one needs this right now. Go—get drunk, or whatever it is you do when everyone hates you. I don't care," Alex tells her, eyes narrowing rapidly. _I could leave you here_ , she thinks, all viciousness, all spite. The dull red glow of too many souls in a single body shines in her mind, and then that body falling, _falling_ , the sickening _crunch_ of bone against concrete. _I could let the ghosts have you, and no one would ever know_. "Just leave him alone."

A sharp, hoarse laugh leaves Clarissa's throat. She doesn't say anything, just waves them away as she heads for the water. Nona looks nervously between her retreating back and Alex like she's not sure what to do, not sure which way to go.

Alex raises a shoulder in a crow's shrug, gives her a tiny smile. _I get it. Go on_.

"What was _that_?" Ren asks, eyes wide. He's staring after Nona's retreating back like he can't look away. Of course he can't, he likes her so much that he's blind to pretty much anything else.

"Clarissa being her usual shitty self," Alex says, but she's returned her attention to Jonas. He's still way too pale, and she has to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from reaching over to touch his elbow. He looks like he could use the comfort of it, but they aren't there yet. They won't be there for a long time. Maybe never again, for all she knows. "Hey, Jonas, you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm—yeah, it's cool. I just thought—nah, never mind. I'm cool."

He is so not cool, but Alex doesn't say that. She knows exactly what it feels like, the remembering. It's not easy. And it hurts. It really, really hurts.

But she watches as it fades from his face, slipping back behind whatever barrier the ghosts have managed to keep the memories behind. Alex doesn't know why she's the only one allowed to remember. She thinks it probably has to do with misery and how it ages, better after being allowed to _soak_. Better sipped down like expensive brandy. Better when it's only one.

So Jonas remembering… Jonas remembering probably isn't something they're okay with.

Again: oh, _fuck_.

Alex's hand closes around the radio in her pocket. It's cool, too cool, and even though the plastic slowly warms beneath her touch, she shudders. No, there's no telling what the ghosts would do to Jonas if he remembered. Maybe they'll send him back on his own. Maybe they'll taunt him with flashes of memory, no context. Maybe he'll remember his arms around her head, her head on his chest, their mouths slotting together like missing puzzle pieces.

Maybe. But probably not.

Not even the ghosts are that cruel.

"Uh. Are we all—good to go? I mean…" Ren says, sending a significant glance towards where Nona and Clarissa have settled by the fire. Alex has no desire to play Truth or Slap right now. It'll just make her mad. Clarissa will push because she always pushes, and Alex's got enough of the sick hot red in her chest tonight. Fear is a good distraction, but every time they go through this, Alex gets a little less scared. There are only so many choices. There are only so many things she can say. Isn't that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

But it's whatever. The ghosts don't want Alex dead. They want her to _play_ , and that might actually be worse.

"Go ahead, Ren. I'm kinda not feeling it, tonight," Alex tells him. She loops her arms around herself to ward of the night's chill, imagines that it's Michael holding her together. Her brother did always know how to get her to chill out. Does always know. Will always know.

"Jonas?" Ren asks. "You gonna come?"

Jonas is looking at her, too. Just looking. There's no judgement in his expression, and she thinks that maybe that's what she misses most. He's always good at taking whatever she throws at him and rolling with it, even when none of it makes sense.

 _Stop that_ , Alex wants to tell him. She dips her head, makes a face. _Stop looking at me like that_.

"Nah," he's telling Ren, too casual, shrugging those wide shoulders. "I think I'll stay with Alex. She could use the company."

Alex jerks her head up, eyes huge in her face. No, Jonas is supposed to go play Truth or Slap with everyone else. He's not supposed to be looking at her like she's the answer to a question he didn't even know he'd asked. He's not supposed to—

Ren raises an eyebrow. He stares at Alex a second too long. Like he knows. And, see, this is why at the end, Ren is still her best friend: he gets it. He gets it when she's half-crazy and shaking in the bathtub three days after Michael drowns, and he gets it now. Even when everything's falling apart, he still _gets_ it. A wave of affection rolls through Alex's chest. "O—kay? Shout if you need anything. And we still gotta check out the caves later!"

"Yeah, definitely," Jonas says easily, grinning at him. There's nothing in his face but smooth charm. Alex would hate him for it if she didn't know that he's actually totally terrible at people always, and that he taught himself good cheer in juvie when there was nothing else. The knowledge sort of puts a cap on her annoyance. "Save me a beer."

Ren laughs, a great big sound full of bravado. They're all full of it, really, all too young and too inexperienced and way too good at posturing. Pretending is easy, except when it's not. Her old friend babbles something too fast to catch, and then he's off across the sand to go bother the other half of their party.

Alex thinks she can good-natured humming from the ghosts. She has no idea why. The edges of the radio bite into her fist.

"What the _hell_ was that?!" Jonas asks, voice low.

"What the hell was what?" Alex asks in reply. But he's staring at her with his lips pressed tightly together, and she knows. She knows.

(Jesus, where is a reset when she actually _needs_ it?)

" _That_ ," he says, struggling for words. His hands flex at his sides. He's about two seconds away from lighting another cigarette, Alex can tell. It's going to kill him. What isn't going to kill him. "I saw—it was—the cave, there was a… triangle? And you were—"

Alex's shoulders slump.

Four hours isn't a record, but it's pretty close. She can feel the ghosts whispering. They're _delighted_. Someone else to play with! It unspools in her head; all the way they're going to unmake him until there's absolutely nothing left, until Jonas isn't _Jonas_ anymore, until he's just another thing. Until he's as much theirs as Alex herself is. Oh, they're going to have so much fun.

"Welcome to Edwards Island," she says, so tired. "Can we just try not to get killed?"

—

.

.

.

.

.

 _tbc_.


	3. on velvet ground

—

.

.

.

.

.

As for me, I'm—

[— _play! play! didn't you hear? we said play!_ ]

—

"This again? God, don't you have anything _better_ to do?"

_Not really_ , the girl on the lamppost says. Jonas is frozen in the loop, and the only thing Alex can do is stare up; ghost-Clarissa sits up on the street light, and swings her legs back and forth. Her whole face is lit arterial crimson from the light pouring out of her eyes. Okay, that's creepy. The ghosts tilt their head and swing, swing, swing, _I mean, who has anything_ better _to do, really? And what's_ better _, anyway?_

"Not this," Alex says. Sighs. She waves in the universal gesture for _you fucking idiot_. "Get down, we both know you're not gonna hurt her."

_We could, you know_ , she says. They say. _This one, she's already ours. Ours to own. Ours to hurt. If we wanted_.

"Yeah, you know what, I'm not super feeling it, actually," Alex tells them, caustic. She wraps her arms around herself. It's stupid because she's not going to give these people up—none of them, not even Clarissa no matter _how_ bitchy she's feeling—and the ghosts know it. It's a sick little game. "Seriously, get down, you look ridiculous."

The ghosts laugh with Clarissa's mouth, their voices layered over hers. The body falls—

" _Ow_ ," says Jonas.

"Welcome back," says Alex. Clarissa's gone. The loop's broken, the wave smoothing out, turns linear again, and they're back on track. "Time shenanigans. I'm getting _really_ tired of time shenanigans."

"So am I," Jonas mutters, rubbing his head. "Why—Alex, why do I feel like we've done this a bunch of times already?"

"Uh, because we kinda have—"

"I don't—not this," he says, gestures vaguely around them. "Well, yeah, okay, this too. But I mean—all of it, you know? The whole night. I feel like we've done it before, all of it. Not once, or twice. Ten times. A hundred times. What I was saying before, with the triangle…"

Alex looks at him for a long moment with her heart pounding in her throat.

She could tell him.

She could.

(God, this reset is going to be painful. Alex can already feel the headache pounding through her teeth: a drum, a gong, a call to war.)

"I'm not allowed to have you both," she says.

"What," Jonas says.

"You and Michael," Alex tells him. It feels like trying to pop a locked elbow, moving slow and painful but knowing, just _knowing_ that as soon as it cracks and breaks the relief will flood in and it'll be so much better. Relief. God, _relief_. "I think it's a law of the universe or something. If Michael comes back, I don't get you. And like, yeah, we're friends! But it's not—it's not the same."

"O-kay," Jonas says, and despite the skepticism in the word, he's going with it. Or at least mostly he is. He's not about to call her crazy, at the very least, and that's better than what she'd expect out of anyone else. "So now I'm confused. What does—?"

"My dead brother," Alex sighs, only flinches a little bit as she says it. Nothing hurts so much, anymore, because as much as it sucks her in, she knows that they can come out of this alive. Michael grins in the back of her head. "Isn't, um, completely dead. Because you're not—you're not wrong, okay? The ghosts, and the triangle, and the—the whole thing, it's not—this isn't the first time we've done this. Might not even be the last. Probably not, even, you know?"

"Nope. You're gonna have to explain this one for me," Jonas says, voice heavy. He flops down on the curb, and waits for her to do the same.

Alex sits. She fiddles with the jacket, for a minute, hand closing almost automatically around the radio in the pocket. It's small and cold in her fist, and God, are they actually going to let her have the whole conversation before they reset? And they said they weren't cruel.

Stupid ghosts.

She breathes. "It's like—it's like kids, you know? The ghosts, I mean. They're like kids. And they're bored and this, this whole thing is just, it's a game and it's messed up and god, Jonas, I'm so tired. I'm so _tired_!"

Jonas is a solid warm weight at her side. It's painful familiar, and he must feel it, too, because he's slipping his arm around her shoulder in a long-forgotten instinct, and he blinks like he's surprised he gave himself the permission. "I've wanted to do this all night. I thought I was going crazy."

"I kind of wigged out the first time it happened, honestly," Alex says. She drops her head to his shoulder, closes her eyes, and hardly feels it when Jonas shifts her a little bit closer.

"The first time what happened?"

"The first time a lot of things happened," she says. Now isn't really the time to talk about the thing she really wants to talk about, his mouth against her mouth, mint and ash and _want_ like she's never known. There are easier topics, for sure, and that—whatever _that_ is—is probably better left for when they're not, y'know, mostly possessed. "The first time Michael came back was a freaky one, ho-man, you don't even know. I almost lost it."

"Yeah, I can see how that'd be an issue," Jonas says, mild.

"Shut up, I'm telling the story," Alex says with her eyes still closed. Bursting into tears is still usually her reaction; it's a combination of hysteria and exhaustion and fear, and seeing Michael's grin hovering above her face still sends everything into overdrive. "No one ever remembers that he was dead."

"Not even me?"

"Especially you. You never remember my version of things," Alex tries for a grin. Fails.

"So what are we, then?"

"Friends, usually," Alex says. She has to bite the words off so that she doesn't let anything else slip out, but it's hard. Tucked beneath his arm like this is a good place to be, so heavy and protected that for a minute it seems like the ghosts never existed at all, and that this night is actually what it was supposed to be. "Best friends."

"Usually?"

"You would," she says. There's a weird second where she almost shoves him away and time seems to _slip_ , and god, there it is, it's the reset, it's happening, she can already hear the stupid laughter—

But then it's gone, nothing scratches out, and Jonas' arm is still around her shoulders. Alex feels so, so, so small.

Wait, what.

"Guilty as charged," Jonas grins out of the corner of his mouth. "So. Usually?"

"I hate you," Alex tells him, but she doesn't, really. Her elbow ends up in his side regardless, and he hacks out a laugh. The fairy lights strung up along main street twinkle more cheerfully than the stars. "Usually, I manage to talk Michael out of going out of state for school and he doesn't drown and then my parents never do the whole, y'know, divorce thing. _Usually_."

"What about the times that _aren't_ usual?"

The truth, as always, hurts.

"I don't remember every single reset," she says, very quietly. She tilts her head back to look up at the greying sky. It holds no answer; it never does. The universe doesn't really care about the tiny ants walking across the face of a tiny planet in a tiny solar system. It's got better things to do. The ghosts could learn a thing or two, now that she thinks about it. "The really early ones are… more difficult, before the ghosts realized… Whatever. Not the point. Sometimes we stay siblings. Once you ended up hating me? I think?"

"Only once? Are you sure it was only—"

"Oh, shut up," Alex says, shoves him again. The teasing is always the hardest to parse apart, but she can't help herself, and it's not like he remembers the last recurrence anyway. "Your feeling is _fine_."

"My feeling?"

"You only have the one," Alex snickers

"Where did you get the impression that I only have one feeling," but it's not a question so much as it's a statement, like she's not _wrong_ but she couldn't possibly know it.

"Right before you kissed—" Alex cuts herself off.

( _Good job, soldier! You have taken a perfectly acceptable conversation about feelings-or-lack-thereof and_ ruined _it! What was that about wanting to leave it for later? When you, you know, aren't about to face your worst nightmare all over again? Applause all around, everyone gets a raise, congratulations team! Or not_ , laugh the ghosts on the frequency that resonates through her skull. Or maybe they don't; Alex can't tell anymore.)

Jonas stares down at her for a very long time, waiting for the end of the sentence. It hangs between them like a broken thread.

Alex refuses to meet his eye.

"Als…" he says.

"Look, it doesn't matter, it was dumb. We should probably go," Alex says. Her shoulders hunch up around her ears, an uncomfortable little thrill going up her spine. That's shyness. _Frick_. "Ren and Nona are waiting—"

"Other me kissed you," Jonas cuts her off, very quietly. He's staring down at her, eyes a little wider than they should be, and oh, _shit_ , she recognizes that look. It's the same crazy-intense look he'd worn when he'd been all up in her grill the first time. The little wrinkle between the eyebrows is the same. Again it hits her that no matter what universe, Jonas is always, always going to be Jonas. "That's when I said—you let other me kiss you."

"Yeah," she says, blows all the breath out of her lungs. She doesn't ask how he knows. He's remembering, too. "I did."

"Why?"

"I dunno. Because I was pressed up against the wall and you were right there and it was the middle of summer and it was so hot and—I don't know, okay! I wanted you to! You kissed me and then I kissed you and then the ghosts reset everything because they're assholes like that, and it sucks because I can't stop thinking about it even thought we have, like, a hundred other more pressing things to deal with right now!"

"Oh," he says, but the grin has turned into something stretched wider and even nerdier than she's used to. And that's saying something, because Jonas is actually a huge freakin' nerd. He's good at hiding it, good at projecting calm and cool and in control when actually he's having a complete internal meltdown.

"You've known me for, like, six hours, Jonas. Chill," Alex says. Something cold slips down her collar, hangs clammy against the small of her back. Fear, maybe. Or déjà vu. Or both, even.

(Probably both.)

"Yeah, this time around," Jonas says, and it's very even. It's like four in the morning and the sky is already beginning to turn light; false dawn peeks over the horizon and bleaches them both out into silvers and greys, a pale palette of shades that don't really have a name. Alex is kind of annoyed how good he looks like this. It's incredibly unfair, in light of everything else. Like, what, he's got to be attractive even when they're all on a crash-course to the end of their lives? What even _is_ that?

Stupid summer. Stupid ghosts. Stupid _Jonas_.

"Hey," he says. "Look at me."

She keeps her chin down, lets her bangs shadow her eyes. Looking at him is not a thing she is down for, right now, because feelings are awful and hard and gross and he's—god, he's _Jonas_! He's her _brother_! No one is supposed to want to kiss their brother, that's really seriously weird and also kind of illegal!

"Alex," Jonas sighs. He's so lucky he can't hear her internal monologue, honestly. "C'mon. I'm not pissed. Why even would I be?"

When she mutters something vulgar under her breath, he just laughs.

It's a weird sound, that laugh. A little too bright, a little too big, a little too real. It's not a nice sound, either, it's this horrible raspy cough-laugh that comes from deep in his chest. But it's—it's a laugh.

Usually, they're all too busy being scared out of their minds to laugh.

But the thing is, the ghosts are quiet. The lamppost where Clarissa-not-Clarissa likes to sit and swing her legs back and forth, back and forth? It's empty. The whole town is quiet, the place is still kitschy as hell, and time just kind of—stands still. It is and it isn't.

No one is getting out of this alive.

And maybe, maybe that's the point. Maybe the point isn't getting out alive, because this is life! And no one gets out of life alive, that's kind of the whole _thing_ , right? You grow and you bend and you break, and you just hope that it's enough. Alex never really learned that when Michael was alive, and she really hasn't learned it now. The ghosts press up against her chest, a leaden weight.

She's going to carry them for the rest of her life. For the rest of all her lives.

"I hate you so much," Alex says.

"You really don't, though," Jonas says. He's still got his arm around her shoulders, and this is a circular conversation: they've had it before, and they'll have it again. One reset, Alex had asked him what his type was. They'd been talking about Clarissa, and Michael, and dating. Which, okay, whatever, there were definitely better things to talk about than that. And probably what he'd said had been a joke, Carmen Sandiego, right, but—red jacket and mystery.

If nothing else, well, she's got that down.

Alex sighs out something like exhaustion. Mint and ash. His arm pressed to the linoleum above her head, hating the safety of the gesture as much as she wanted it. The sky above them, prickly all over with stars.

Hunger and want and fear, layered over the static.

"Yeah," Alex says. Drops her head to his shoulder because she's earned this one minute. They both have. "I guess I really don't."

She waits for the reset.

It still doesn't come.

—

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.

.

.

_tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> played the new content. had the sads. decided to inflict the sads on everyone else so that we can all sit in this dumpster together. i mean. it's pretty nice for a dumpster, right?


	4. winter hymns

—

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As for me, I'm—

[— _pause; wait, wait. shouldn't this be a rewind? where's the rewind?_ ]

—

Alex isn't surprised when the world blots out and she's all alone.

The jangling tune isn't Jonas' mom.

It never was. It never is. It never will be.

But it makes him happy, and there have been so many lives where they've lain side-by-side staring at the night sky and he says, _I know it wasn't her but… thanks_ , and even though it's shitty and wrong and awful, it's all Alex can give him. She's not all the way—not all the way in the world, sometimes, is Alex. And maybe it's just a product of slipping through time or being outside it or _whatever_ her relationship is with time as a construct, but even before the first reset (even before Michael died, really, but that's not something she wants to think about too hard because it scrunches all her insides up), there was… something.

She's just different, maybe.

Alex wanders through air thick and black as ink. Breathing it is hard like her lungs can't quite—can't quite figure out what they're supposed to do with it. It's dead space, not quite oxygen and not quite _not_ oxygen, which isn't really a thing that should make sense but what actually makes sense, anymore? She's lived a hundred years, and she's still only seventeen. She's always only seventeen.

(Being seventeen forever is the actual worst. Alex needs to find some chill, seriously, this is not a young adult novel and jesus, she really hopes that eventually she's going to grow up.)

"Okay, I give up, you win, let's talk," Alex says into the darkness

_Giving up? Already? That's new_ , not-Clarissa says. The body hangs suspended in midair, arms crossed over it's chest. The world coalesces into being like this: ground first in blocky shocky black, old-blood sky, crimson lamps for eyes. The ghosts hover, and they wait.

"Yeah, well, a lot of things are new this time around," Alex mutters. She drops her head back to look up at them. "Are you going to keep resetting this every single I kiss anyone?"

_Mm, probably?_ they say, but it comes out sound like a question. _We don't control everything, you know_.

"Sure feels like it," Alex says. She pulls the radio out of her pocket, turns it on and fiddles with the dial. Not to the frequency that'll end this, but just—something. Looking for something dumb to do.

_Wait_ , the ghosts say.

It's not like she really has a choice, though, is it.

Alex waits.

They build him out of stardust and leftover tape recorders, dandelion fluff and hot summer nights. Bones out of broken bed frames, muscles out of wire, stretched canvas for skin. They build him out of memories and cigarette smoke and when they're finished, when they're finished they set him in front of her with a flourish, with a wide smile and sparkplugs for eyes and god, _god_ , it's Jonas but it's not Jonas even a little bit.

Maggie had thought that the Kanaloa officers had regressed into something like childhood. It's in the games, the scratchy old fifties propaganda, the flickers of little boys kissing little girls. And now there's this, a boy built wrong for a girl built broken, and they're still trying to find ways to play.

Well, she wasn't wrong.

_What_ , they say, _don't you like him_?

"Seriously?" Alex asks. She stares at the starshine boy with his canvas skin. She thinks that if she touches him, he'll fall apart. "Like are you—are you even kidding me, right now. What is _wrong_ with you? Put this back!"

_We can't_ , pause, _unmake_.

Unmaking does not come naturally to the ghosts. Unmaking requires forethought. Unmaking requires finesse. They built this boy and offered him up to her like a sacrifice, like all the sacrifices. Four people in a car underwater or the Kanaloa's hungry reactors or Clarissa herself.

All of them part of the long and glorious history.

Alex breathes out, and the star boy blows away.

"Yeah, I didn't think so," she tells them. "Try it again."

The ghosts sigh, ninety-seven voices layered over one another. Eighty-five officers and twelve passengers died when the Kanaloa exploded, but sometimes it seems like so many more than that. Sometimes it seems like thousands, the thunder of all those minds compressed into one body so loud that it shakes through her bones.

Space-time _wrenches_.

It screams through her skull, fourteen billion years of pressure and hunger and _want_ , the need to devour so intense it's painful. Alex grinds her teeth, riding it out, because it'll be over soon, it has to be over soon. What more can they do, except this? They watched the birth of the universe and they want Alex to see it too, but a little less than fourteen billion years is a lot of years to carry.

The tear closes, and time reels in on itself like a too-stretched rubber band. _Snap_!

_Here_ , the ghosts say, _god. Demanding, much_.

"Don't do the slang thing, okay, you're not good at it," Alex tells them, and catches the body they shove at her. It's Jonas because of course it's Jonas, real Jonas, skin-and-sinew-and-bone Jonas. She catches him on the comedown, letting the earth rock them both back to sleep. He's warm. Breathing, at least.

"Stupid," she says, achingly fond. "I still hate your hat. C'mon, wake up, this is really not the time to be sleeping on the job. Garbage snowmen have lives too, okay?"

Alex can't say she's super surprised when she doesn't get a response.

She also can't say she's super surprised when the ghosts yank Jonas back, reeling him in. He's a puppet with cut strings, so pale against the carmine sky, so completely dead to the world. It's a disaster, this whole thing is a disaster, and god, she's just so _tired_.

"Okay," Alex says. "You made your point. Masters of the universe, whatever, I don't care! Can you please stop floating my friends and throwing them out of windows and things? We are way past enough here, I mean it."

_Not just friends, though, are you. Not with him, anyway_.

"Oh my god," she says, rolls her eyes so hard she thinks they might fall out of their sockets. "Will you _please_ leave him out of this? This is not even about him! It was never even about him!"

_So what is it about_ , ask the ghosts. Clarissa's body is tall, long thin lines, and they use her long thin fingers to tip Jonas' chin up, tilt his head back and forth to study. _He's pretty_ , they say, _if you like guys with big shoulders. You do, though, so I guess… What was it Ren called him, dear? A strapping young lad?_

"I don't know what it's about, but it's not about Jonas," Alex says tightly. She grips the frayed cuffs of Michael's jacket, tries very hard not to scream GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM, because that's just—that's just not helpful, okay. It's just not. "Isn't it enough that I keep coming back? That I don't just… isn't it _enough_?"

_No_ , they say, shaking Clarissa's head. _It's not_.

Alex remembers: the cave, the graffiti, the man and the dog or lack thereof. The armoire. The triangle. The Source. _Because it's scary_!

And it is scary.

It is.

That great big black chasm of nothingness, it's scary. The end is scary. Being dead is scary and being alone is scary and being eaten alive is scary, too. The way that Jonas looked at her, such soft eyes, such a soft mouth, that's scary. The whole world is scary, and it doesn't—it doesn't _end_. Things never really stop being scary.

"I get it," Alex says. "I get that it's scary."

_No, you don't_ , they say.

"I do, though," she tells them. Her chest burns with the things she's been too scared to say since the beginning, but they're all she's got left. Nothing left but the truth. Inhale. Exhale. "I'm scared that this is never gonna end. I'm scared that I'm gonna be stuck coming back to this stupid island over and over again for the rest of linear time! I'm scared that—"

They wait for her to finish the sentence. When she doesn't, they tilt their head. _Scared that what_?

"Don't be stupid. You already know."

_Say it, Alex_.

Alex sighs. "I'm scared that I'm never going to grow up."

_That's not fair_ , the ghosts say, and she thinks that they might actually flinch.

"What's fair, anyway?" she throws back at them, and the words come, then, spilling out of that deep dark sticky place inside of her chest where she keeps her brother's smile. "You got to grow up! All of you, you had families and—and kids! You got to grow up! And you died, I know, and they lied about it, and that was wrong. But like, what do you _expect_? I'm still a kid!"

_We gave you Michael back_!

"And you keep taking him _away_!"

The ghosts go very still, and so does Alex. They look at each other, the ghosts out of Clarissa and Alex out of Alex, and for a very long time, no one says anything at all.

_You know_ , they say, soft and strange and recalcitrant, _we were always here_.

"What does this have to do with anything?"

_Shut up and listen, we're teaching you something_ , the ghosts scold. _Even before the Kanaloa, there was something here. Not us. Also us. Kind of both?_

"Again," Alex says, "what does this have to do with anything?"

_The island doesn't keep us here. Nothing does. We're just part of a long and glorious history_.

"And you don't want to be forgotten. I know," Alex says. She has to work not to roll her eyes. It's not like this is anything she hasn't heard before. The blast door is behind her like a tear in the world. The blast door is always behind her like a tear in the world. Escape, damnation, a new beginning all over.

But she's not leaving Clarissa. Michael would never forgive her.

_Would you_? they ask.

"Would I what?" Alex asks.

_Forget_.

"Oh, forget the worst night of my life, relived so many times I can't even count them anymore? Absolutely, I won't think about it ever again," Alex says, sarcasm thick on her tongue, and this time she does roll her eyes. "Come on, I can't stop thinking about you for five minutes. I couldn't forget even if I wanted to."

Not-Clarissa tilts their head. _Do you love him? Jonas?_

"Didn't I tell you to leave him out of it?!"

_It's just a question! Do you love him?_

"I don't know. Maybe."

_We remember love. Love's nice_ , and it echoes, breaking up into static: love's nice, love's nice, love's nice. It bounces off the cave walls, repeating into infinity. Love's nice. Salt on the breeze, the island in the sunshine, a girl in a floppy hat staring out to sea. Bent over backwards and laughing into a mouth, sticky handprints on the wall, two sets of shoes. Maggie's dress, tugging on the skirt, ice cold beer against overheated skin—

Yeah. Love's nice.

"So are we going to do this again? Or like what, man?" Alex asks. She runs a hand through her bangs, and it comes away a little bit teal. Too much dye, last time. Maybe she'll go back to brown after this. The teal is getting kind of old.

_You know the rules_ , the ghosts say. They sound tired of saying it.

Alex is pretty tired of hearing it, too.

But god, something's got to give.

"Yeah," Alex says. "But I don't want to _play_ anymore. Okay? I don't want to play!"

_That's not a choice you get to make_.

It scratches out, then, the words crackling and it's not not-Clarissa or not-Jonas or not-anyone. Just the ghosts over the radio with their gaping mouths and empty eyes, grasping fingers sneaking into all the cricks and crevices of Alex's brain, searching for purchase in the swirling depths of her chest. It's a little like a dentist's appointment, invasive prickles against her gums, tongue too thick, can't breathe around the acrid fake cherry of anesthesia. Cherry, crimson, carmine, everything's all red today.

But here's what it comes down to: they can't take her soul, and she can't fucking _stop_.

"Actually," Alex says, "it really is."

And she pulls the stupid radio out of her stupid pocket, and god, everything's so _stupid_ , it never stops being stupid, it never ends. It's going to be like this for the rest of linear time, this one stupid year looping back in on itself until there's nothing left.

But hey, maybe next time Jonas will have a clue.

(Maybe _Alex_ will have a clue.)

_Wait, wait,_ the ghosts gasp, ripping through half an octave in their desperation. It's all white handprints on black chalkboard, hangman's noose knot, blood between the teeth. _Alex, wait_!

Because this isn't familiar at all. Alex's fingers pause against the dial, regardless.

_Let us have her_ , they say, running Clarissa's fingers through her hair. The push Jonas' body back towards her. His eyelids flutter, and it would be unfair if Alex thought they had any comprehension of the word. But they don't, because they offered her a star-boy in his place, and they have no idea what it's like to want to stop. They don't know how. _Just her, just her, everyone else can go._

"Nope," Alex says. "Not feeling it today."

_WHY NOT_?

"Because Michael loves her," she says. It's weird, but she thinks she gets it, finally, what he meant when he talked about Clarissa pushing him up on stage and then cursing the whole bar out when they didn't laugh, and why it meant something. She thinks she gets it, because she can see Jonas doing exactly the same kind of thing, and it makes her heart swell painfully. She thinks she finally gets it, and that's maybe the saddest thing she's ever really got in her whole entire life. In all her lives. "And I love him."

And Alex tunes out, and tunes in.

[ _SCCTCCHHH—but it's nice. yeah. love's nice. SCHHTTCCHTT_ —]

She opens her eyes to her older brother leaning over her.

The sun's rising.

Alex starts to cry.

—

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.

_tbc_.


	5. nightbloom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> crawls back into the trash with a bottle of gin HELLO GARBAGE MY OLD FRIEND

—

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As for me, I'm—

[ _—fast-forwards; can't we skip this part? alex, come down here please!_ ]

—

The first days after the island are always a little unreal. It's like everything's just—yeah, no, Alex doesn't really have an explanation for it.

It's a lot of things, but _unreal_ comes closest.

So the first days after the island are unreal, and everyone's skittish, and there's no getting around the fact that they're not all sure how to even _exist_ anymore. Edwards Island was a gong show, so loud that the echoes of it last forever and for always, a tightly-knit skein of thread that binds them all in that dark and quiet place.

Ren's stretched out on her bed with his arms folded behind his head instead of a pillow. The sunlight filters in through the curtains gauzy and too-bright white, so brilliant that it dazzles and Alex has to look away to keep from flinching. His hair is glowing copper-orange, every strand on fire.

Fire, flames, the bonfire on the beach underneath the stars—

The ghosts haven't let her go, yet. Alex can't stop the flinch, this time.

"So," Ren says. "Jonas."

"So," Alex parrots. "Nona."

"One of these things is not like the other!" Ren laughs. Something catches the light and flashes; he's just started with the gauges, and even though they're still so small, they sparkle. Of course they do—this is Ren. If there's not _sparkle_ involved, it's probably not actually Ren. By summer's end they'll be twice that size, glittering diamonds in his ears, and Alex only knows that because she's seen him do it before. Besides, this is how they are: she plans huge sprawling flower tattoos that'll never come to fruition, and he plans to pierce himself full of holes but never actually does because he's been terrified of needles for as long as she's known him.

The gauges were a dare, or proof that no little needles were going to scare him anymore when _ghosts_ had happened. They were an act of defiance in the same way that living is an act of defiance, the same way that listening to a radio is an act of defiance. _You can't stop me. Nothing can stop me_.

Or maybe they were just to impress Nona, because Nona likes her boys pierced, and honestly Ren is a _suck_ when Nona's involved. God, they're gross. They're the only categorically good thing that ever came out of the island.

(Ren had fainted very briefly in the piercer's chair. Nona and Alex had laughed themselves silly. It was a horrible thing to laugh about, but it was also the first time either of them had laughed since they got on that stupid ferry three days prior. When he finally came 'round, it was to the pair of them leaning over him and grinning like maniacs, and he'd tried valiantly for a smile. That had been a good day.)

Alex forces herself to look at them, and finds that they don't hurt so much.

"You never used to space out so much," Ren says. He moves kind of weird, shoulder shrinking in then out like breathing, like beating, like a crow learning how to laugh.

"You're worse, man. And don't even start, I still haven't forgiven you for that second brownie," Alex says, and shoves him over to plop herself down next to him. The bed sinks down beneath her, cool pillows and cooler sheets burnt out white in the soft light of the sun. "It's not like that."

"Let it go, my friend, the magic must be mixed. I will concede, however, that that second brownie may have been a bad decision. But, uh, Alex? You about Jonas? It's like, really like that," he says. He's teasing, still, but there's genuine curiosity buried somewhere deep in the statement. Ren looks at her out of the corner of his eye. It feels like a long time, even though it probably isn't.

And again: time doesn't really work the same way for Alex the way it does for everyone else. It just… _doesn't_.

"Oh my god. Stop that, will you?" Alex pokes him in the stomach when he doesn't stop giving her That Look. "It's really not like that! It's—I don't know. Something else."

"Yeah?" Ren asks. "What else is there?"

"It's—" Alex starts, but has to stop to reign herself in. She can't… the thing is, Ren seriously doesn't remember any universe where Michael died. And that's how Alex likes it, because yeah, dead brother? Not super fun.

But then there's moments like these, and they aren't super fun, either.

Given the choice, though, she's always going to bring Michael back. Alex sighs with her whole body, and starts again. "It's—okay, maybe it's a little like that. He just—he gets it, you know? All of it."

Ren goes back to staring at the ceiling. "Yeah," he says. "I know."

Like Nona gets it, Alex doesn't say. Doesn't _need_ to say. She reaches over to knock her knuckles against his ribs, because for Ren, Nona gets it the same way that Jonas gets it for Alex. The same way that Clarissa gets it for Michael.

(Yeah, alright. Alex blows all the breath in her lungs away. She gets it now, about Clarissa. She _gets_ it. It churns through her stomach, the knowing and the regret. If this is growing up, Alex doesn't like it very much. Maybe the ghosts have it right: reset, reset, reset.)

Alex opens her mouth to say something, but the words get stuck in her throat, rolling like marbles in between her teeth. It's just… hard. That's all. She flops backwards into the tiny crack of space between Ren's side and the edge of the bed. "Hey, move over, this bed is big enough for like, three people!"

"Do I have to," Ren purses his lips at her.

"Yes," Alex purses her lips right back.

"You wound me, madame," he says mournfully, but he rolls and there's space between them that Alex immediately steals because it's more comfortable and also falling off the bed is like, the last thing she wants to do today. Because falling makes her think of Fort Milner, and Clarissa in the window or hanging from the ceiling and the sound of bone _crunching_ which isn't even a real thing, so much of the time, she must have dreamed it because they were two stories up and there's no way she and Jonas could have actually _heard_ that—

Aw, _shit_.

It's never going to end. She told the ghosts that she didn't want to play anymore, but they're still here. They're always still here. Alex presses her face into the pillow and takes two very long, very slow breaths.

 _You're okay_ , she tells herself. _You're okay_.

Nothing is okay, though. Not really.

"I guess you coulda picked worse," Ren says, a long time later. He folds his arms behind his head, lounging like he's cool. "Matt Davidson's been talking about asking you out for weeks."

"Liar," Alex says, half-heartedly smacks his chest. She hardly even remembers what Matt Davidson looks like. He has a face probably. Maybe even hair. Who knows. She reaches over to smack him, the back of her hand hard against the cavity of his chest.

"Ow! We are _never_ playing Truth or Slap ever again."

"Yeah, you know what, let's not," she sighs, doesn't tell him that there was a whole string of resets where she cheerfully hit him in the face because she was tired and furious and he was being a lying liar who lied about things like being in love with Nona when he so obviously, painfully was. Alex is usually a pretty chill kind of dude, but there are only so many times you can do a thing over before getting frustrated and quitting out of sheer spite. Like a video game, dying against the same boss over and over and over until you've played it so many times that you're mouthing their stupid dialogue right along with them, and then when they kill you anyway, you end up screaming and throwing the controller.

Ragequit. That's the word.

But anyway, the point is that it's things like that that she doesn't know how to go about navigating. There isn't a definitive line, what is and isn't okay. They say sailors used to use the stars to find their way home, but Alex doesn't have much in common with sailors. Not ones that are alive, anyway.

(She doesn't have much in common with anyone, period. _Home_ is getting to be a pretty impossible concept, these days.)

And that's the real tragedy of the thing. Edwards Island was a choice. Not a good one, but still a choice, and everyone outside of it could never understand—they lived a dark carnival, a horrorshow nightmare, and there is no coming back from something like that the same. You live and you live and you live until you don't, but it's not…

It wouldn't be fair to expect someone outside to really get it.

Even now, in her own bedroom with her dumb best friend flopped down next to her, Alex doesn't really expect him to _get_ it. He doesn't remember the airwaves, the _hum_ of Epiphany Fields, the clawing terror of the full press of the ghosts' fear.

The only person who gets it, who really, _really_ gets it? Is Jonas.

Even when he doesn't remember, he still _gets_ it.

Yeah, it kind of scares Alex half to death.

"Wow, are you two _still_ in here?"

Alex and Ren both sit up like a gun's gone off, and not just a voice.

"Chill," Michael says, blinking, "it's just me."

"Helpful, Mike," Alex mutters, flopping back down. Her older brother is washed out unreal in the sunlight. She can't even tell who's a ghost and who isn't, anymore. That's probably not a good way to start this loop off, jesus. "Now my nerves are _completely_ shot, thanks for that!"

"Shot nerves? There's a couple of brownies in my bag, I can go grab 'em—"

"No brownies, Ren," both Alex and Michael say sternly at exactly the same time, and Ren shrugs kind of sheepishly. But he doesn't apologize. Some things never change, Alex thinks wryly.

"So what are we talking about?"

"Alex's crush on Jonas," Ren says blithely. "Come sit and help me tease her about it, it'll be a great time!"

"Wow, _stab_ me in the back, why don't you," Alex says.

"It is my duty as your friend to inform your older brother of all teasing opportunities," Ren says solemnly. "I mean, what else are friends _for_ , amirite?"

"I'm telling Nona that you're mean and that she should date me instead."

"You _wouldn't_."

" _Try_ me," Alex shoves him, and he shoves her back, and they squabble like a pair of magpies over a shiny object for long enough that Michael has to clear his throat to remind them that he's there.

"I want to join the cuddle party, kids. Or should I just leave you alone to practise kissing? Is that a thing kids do nowadays?"

"Ew, Mike!"

"You love it," Michael says smugly

"I'm rethinking that assessment," she tells him, dry as the desert.

Her brother laughs. It's nice to remember what that sounds like. Alex softens. Okay, she'll take the ribbing because it means that they'll all laugh, and things won't hurt so much. She's not wearing Mike's jacket. It feels like things might be… who knows. Okay, even.

She'll take the ribbing, but just this once.

"So, Jonas," Michael says after Alex and Ren have pushed over enough for him to lay down next to them, mostly because her brother has the most ridiculous sense of dramatic timing and is also completely incapable of letting things alone.

"I am not having this conversation with you, bucko, you are not my dad," Alex rolls her eyes. She wouldn't have this conversation with her actual dad, either, so that's kind of a moot point.

Her brother laughs until he doesn't. "Bucko, Alex?"

"You use it, too," she says, fond.

"I do, don't I," Michael says, pauses, and then goes, "Seriously, though, a crush on Jonas?"

"Better than Ren, you gotta admit."

"Hey!"

The three of them lay shoulder to shoulder, Michael then Alex then Ren—not short, short, shorter—all three of them staring up at the ceiling. Mike knocks his elbow into her ribs, so gently. When she looks at him, he grins.

But here's the thing: there's a year and a half of memories that Alex just… doesn't have. Never has. Can't have, really, because that year and half is the only one she's never re-lived. Everything else, yeah, everything else she's lived so many times that she can't even count how many times she's done it anymore, but that? The year where Michael _wasn't_ dead? She's never going to remember any of it. And things _happened_ that year. It wasn't just dead space, things didn't just _stop_ , they kept—kept going. They kept happening. There are inside jokes that Alex has to pretend to laugh at because Michael laughs at them or Ren laughs at them or _Clarissa_ laughs at them, and it's like, _wow,_ _I am_ _ **so**_ _way out of my depth here_.

There's another Alex out there somewhere. She's the one who lived that year, and she's the one who deserves to laugh at the stupid puns and the stupid jokes and the stupid, the stupid _all_ of it because _she_ wasn't dumb enough to get her older brother killed in the first place. Maybe she'd have been allowed to have them both, would have never even tried to think of Jonas as a brother. She'd not have been so torn, the ugly oozing cavity of her chest gaping open for anyone to poke around in. Maybe that Alex would have never dyed her hair.

Maybe that Alex would have never done a lot of things.

Maybe that Alex is a ghost, now, too.

But this Alex, current Alex? Time-out-of-time Alex? She doesn't get that. She doesn't get to make that choice, because she made it when she stepped onto the ferry and there's never any avoiding that. The ferry is a fixed point.

(The ghosts are a fixed point. The _only_ fixed point, maybe. Maybe baby, baby birds, baby girls, baby sisters who keep screwing things up—)

It's too early for the reset, but Alex's fingers still shake. It's the stopping, or lack thereof; she can't, she can't, she can't. She just _can't_. It doesn't _work_. She can't just _not_ bring Michael back from the dead—she looks at him out of the corner of her eye again. He's grinning up at the ceiling like an idiot, her own features on someone else's face. Siblings are so weird—because there are fixed points and then there are _fixed_ points, and Michael's continued existence is a _fixed_ point.

Michael's continued existence is as vital to Alex as air.

And not even the ghosts are going to deter her, from that.

Sometimes Alex thinks she's brought this whole thing on herself, because she never really learned to grieve right. Michael died, and her dad moved out and she didn't speak to him for six months because it hurt too much, and then mom went and got married and it's like—what do you do when things break so fundamentally that your whole world falls out from underneath you? What do you do when there's nothing left?

There are no right answers. Alex knows that.

"Hey," she says, a little too loud in the quiet room. It's like chewing broken glass. "I love you guys, you know? Like I really… really love you. Both of you."

Michael pretends to snore and Ren doesn't pretend to burst into tear, in fact just _does_ burst into tears, and they're suddenly a pile of limbs and snot and saltwater and it's actually kind of gross, but—but Alex can feel her brother's heart beating beneath her cheek, and Ren doesn't smell like ocean death at her back anymore.

And maybe that makes it worth it.

The resets, the ghosts, even Jonas. _Especially_ Jonas.

Maybe that makes it all worth it.

—

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 _tbc_.


	6. with different eyes and no shame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so who wants to share a smoke and talk about how much jonas loves alex with me

—

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As for me, I'm—

[— _pause; no, no, by all means, stop, breathe. stop. breathe. try again_.]

—

"Okay, that's it, I gotta know. Why the hell is your brother grinning at me like that?" Jonas asks when he comes to pick her up that night.

It's one of those perfectly clear summer evenings where the daytime blends into the night blue-green-yellow, and the drippy heat lingers for hours after the sun's gone down. What they really need is a storm to wash it all away, but that doesn't look to be happening any time soon—the air isn't charged enough for the kind of thunder that she wants. It's hot, so hot, and the blackening sky is sprinkled liberally with stars.

No chance of showers.

Alex grabs her jacket anyway.

It's like this: Jonas stands in the foyer, looking a little windswept and even more out of place, hair everywhere and his fists stuffed into his pockets like he drove with all the windows rolled down the whole way here. He probably did, now that Alex thinks about it. He likes the wind through his hair and the music on mute, and that never changes.

Jonas is always Jonas, whether he wants to kiss her or not.

Alex shrugs, tries very hard not to think about the fact that she still cares whether he wants to kiss her or not, and also to not go spilling her feelings everywhere. Ugh, gross, she can't even believe this is happening. "Mike is as Mike does. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But hey, thanks for coming to get me. You didn't have to."

"What, you think that after everything, I'm gonna make you _walk_?" Jonas asks. They slip outside together, closing the door on Michael's manic grin. Of course her stupid brother is taking all kinds of glee in this, he and Ren are the worst. She loves them so much it's offensive.

"Oh my god, shut up," Alex says, but she smiles. "I could have just gone with Mike and Clarissa, y'know."

"And you would have complained the whole time and then gone home at ten-thirty, if you came at all," says Jonas. "You can't escape, now, you're stuck with me."

Which, okay, he's not wrong.

Because there's a party across town.

Everyone's going to be there. Ren, Nona; the entire senior class and its various hangers-on. The noise complaints are going to need their own file at police station, probably—even Michael and Clarissa going to head over there later, which Alex only knows because Clarissa had been smoking out on the deck late last night and had asked if she wanted to come along—so it's not like it's a little thing. It might be fun, even.

But the thought of going makes all of Alex's vasculars knot up 'til she can't breathe. So many people in such a small space is asking for trouble. So many bodies, so much life, so much hungry vitality…

She can already feel the ghosts pressing. _Please_ , they murmur. _Please_.

 _No_ , Alex thinks in their vicious direction. She shrugs Michael's jacket over her shoulders as a kind of last defiance, the bright red fabric settling comfortably over her shoulders. For the first few resets, she could hardly stand to look at it, much less _wear_ it. She carried it tied around her waist, its heavy weight always so close to dragging her down. She couldn't wear it, but she couldn't bear to let it go, either—it was Michael's, and he was dead and dying and drowning all the time.

But it's a comfortable thing, now. Familiar.

And that's an armour, all on it's own.

Alex climbs into Jonas' truck, forgetting to pretend that she doesn't know that you have to slam the door hard to close it all the way and that the window doesn't roll down if the seatbelt isn't clicked in. She's spent whole summers in this truck, building blanket forts in the bed and sleeping under the stars.

God, sometimes it's just so _hard_ to pretend that Jonas isn't always her best friend. He doesn't call her on it, just stares at her out of the corner of his eye as he gets settled.

And he doesn't even ask if she wants to turn the radio on, which is funny only because it's sad. Alex kind of misses singing along except that she doesn't, really. Silence is the same shade of gold as the porch light.

For a minute, they just sit there.

"…Do you really wanna go to this thing tonight?" Jonas asks, finally. His knuckles are white around the steering wheel, and he hasn't even turned the key. The engine is silent like so few things are, and for a minute Alex just sits there with her hands in her pockets and doesn't say a word.

It would be better, to go.

Or, no, it wouldn't be better. It would be _easier_.

But easier isn't something that Alex is very good at. It would have been easier to let the ghosts have them all. It would have been easier to let Michael stay dead, to grow up and move on until that particular wound had knit over and scarred. It would have been easier to stop fighting and trying and _living_. That would be easier.

And going to the party tonight? It would keep her from having to deal with the soft blue corduroy of the seats of Jonas' truck, the dark green-grey of his eyes level on her face, the memory of the last reset. It's been like two weeks, but Alex can't just—forget about it. It's burned into her, as permanent as her name.

Alex doesn't know if this is something she's quite ready to face.

"Honestly?" she asks.

"Honestly," Jonas says.

"Honestly," she says a second time, "it's the last thing I want to do. Like, ever. Period. I'd rather eat rusted nails than go to this party tonight."

"Jesus, thank god it's not just me," Jonas says. His hands go lax around the steering wheel, tension draining out of his shoulders so the close-fitting pull of his shirt rumples down to nothing. He unwinds like a spring coiled too tight, and Alex watches the easy way he turns the engine on with a weird, desperate sense of relief.

A thousand resets, and Jonas is still Jonas. Something sharp sticks in between her ribs like a knife; she remembers not-Clarissa with her hands on his face, the sick wash of fury that had coated her tongue, and wonders if this is what everyone else feels all the time.

It's not love, not yet.

But it could be. It could.

"Where d'you wanna go?" he asks. The street splits off here

"Somewhere," Alex says, shrugs a little deeper into Michael's jacket. The road passes away beneath them as they turn onto the highway. It's not supposed to be like this. It's not supposed to be this hard. "Anywhere."

"Als…"

"You used to call me that, you know?" Alex kind of smiles out of the corner of her mouth, but not really. She runs a hand along the faded blue corduroy of the seat. It's dusty under her skin. She's spent a hundred summers in this dumb truck with this dumb boy, brother and best friend and—and something else. It's sick. It's always so sick.

"Call you what?"

"Als," she shrugs.

"I don't think I've ever called you that," he says. His eyes are on the road, but he still can't lie worth a damn. It feels like the whole world is empty, because as soon as they're out of town limits, it's like civilization dies. There's fields and then mountains and then nothing, not even the moon. Not even the stars. Jonas swallows. "At least, I don't think I have.

"C'mon, dude, let's be real here," Alex says, dropping her head back to choke on a laugh. "We both know this isn't the first time we've done this. Can we just, I dunno, acknowledge that we've been possessed like, eighty times? Just, like, for once?"

He doesn't deny it.

They're both very quiet for a very, very long time. Alex presses her forehead to the window, cool glass, radio silent. She doesn't know what to say.

Until:

Jonas pulls off the highway into an empty rest stop. The universe sprawls out above them as he kills the lights, kills the engine, kills the radio like TV killed the radio star except that it didn't, did it. Maybe none of this would have happened, if it had. Michael and Jonas. Jonas and Michael. She doesn't get to have them both.

"Explain that," he says.

 _Explain what_ , she wants to ask, but Alex isn't an idiot.

"I don't know how."

"Alex," he says, quietly, when she doesn't reply because all the words are stuck in her throat. She hates that he gets it, because he _does_ get it. He always _gets_ it. "Try. Please."

"…Do you trust me?" Alex asks, after a long moment.

"Sure," he says.

"No, seriously," Alex shakes her head. "Do you trust me?"

" _Ghosts_ , Als."

"Okay," she says. Inhale, exhale. This is a line she hasn't crossed before; this is something new. Alex doesn't really know how to deal with new things anymore, when she's done the same things so many times. "Don't freak out. Put your seat back."

"That's not reassuring," Jonas says. He puts his seat back, regardless.

Clambering over the stick shift is more difficult that she'd expected it to be. Her knee crunches against the door and she probably elbows him in the kidney, and the wheel digs uncomfortably into the small of her back until she's shuffled forwards far enough that they're nearly breathing the same air.

Somehow, it's as good an explanation as anything. The physicality between them is still so easy; incarnations of touch are a known variable. Alex breathes in. Alex breathes out.

If she's going to tell this story, she's going to tell it right.

"Once upon a time," she starts, "there was a girl who made a mistake. She didn't mean to. No one _means_ to make mistakes. They happen, right? They just—happen. So she made a mistake, and her brother drowned."

Alex swallows hard. "She didn't realize it, but her brother kept everything together. When he died, things broke. Her parents broke. Her friends broke. Everything… _broke_."

Her parents' divorce was such a visceral thing. Alex remembers the shatter of a plate against a wall, and has to close her eyes.

"So her brother drowned, and then her dad moved out, and—and then the girl's mother went on a cruise, and met a man whose wife had died, too, and they fell in love and got married because that's what people in love do, you know? They get married, and they mush their families together even when—even when they shouldn't be," she has to stop to cough, weird and watery. There are tears in larynx, threatening. Alex shoves through it to keep talking, because she has to get this out, she has to.

Jonas deserves that much.

"So the girl's new step-father moved in because her dad had moved out and her real brother was dead and in his place she got another brother, and like, who even does that? Who even gets a new brother like that? Who even—whatever, it doesn't matter. He was nice. A good person, even though he didn't always think he was," she says.

"Alex—" Jonas cuts in.

"Let me finish, okay?" Alex looks at him evenly until he closes his mouth, nods, and then she continues. "So the girl and her new brother end up going out to an island for a senior party because her best friend thought it would be a great idea, which, by the way, was also a mistake—" Jonas snorts, because _mistake_ puts it so very lightly, and Alex has to elbow him again to get him to shut up, "—and they all nearly died. They all _did_ die. Do die. Will die."

" _Will_?"

"I told you this wasn't the first time we've done this," Alex says.

"What happens then?"

She pulls back to blink at him. "What do you mean?"

"How do we get here?" Jonas asks. He's staring at her, focus like a laser. Just as red, just as hot, just as intense. "Your girl still has her brother, doesn't she?"

"There were ghosts on the island," Alex says. "And they let her bring him back. And it fixes things, okay? Yeah, they all die, or died, or _will_ die, but like—they escape, they leave, they get the happy ending. And whatever, so her new brother isn't really her brother anymore, just some boy who switched schools out of North Valley, but it's okay because they're still friends even if it's not—the way it should be. I don't know. They get out, and it's good until it's not, and then—whatever."

"Not whatever," Jonas says. "And then?"

Alex sighs out this great big sound, every last ugly thing she's ever felt. _And then you kissed me, and I was too dumb to let it go, and it gets worse_. "And then the ghosts get bored, and reset everything because they have no morals, and the girl wakes up in her bedroom with one dead brother and one brand new brother, and everything sucks because she has to go play with the ghosts all over again."

"Wait, what," says Jonas.

"You wanted to know how we got here," she shrugs. "That's how. It keeps happening. We get out, we get free, they rewind things and we go back. And like, you know what the worst part is? The absolutely worst part? No one remembers what it was like when the girl's brother was dead," Alex mutters. "That's what hurts the worst. No one remembers, except for the girl and the ghosts."

And the ghosts have a vested interest in remembering, she doesn't say.

 _Alex_ has a vested interest in remembering.

"And, uh, this?" Jonas asks, eyeing her up and down. That's impressive, given that there's like two inches of space between their faces.

"You told me once that your type was mysterious girls in red coats," Alex says, doesn't bother explaining further. Let him figure _that_ one out for himself; she had to do it, too. "Carmen Sandiego, actually, it was kind of hilarious."

"I did _not_ ," Jonas says, but he's grinning at her. It's weird, he shouldn't be grinning like that when she just told him that, in essence, they are trapped in one gigantic loop because Alex doesn't know how to have a stable relationship with anything, especially linear time.

"You did, too!"

" _Didn't_ —"

Alex breathes in, gathers her courage. Alex breathes out, and suddenly they're nose to nose.

"What are you doing," Jonas cuts himself off, so quiet.

"I don't know," Alex says, but she does know, of course she knows, it's a mirror and a reverse and she thinks of that stupid soccer ball moving in that picture. She ducks a little closer, watches a weird flicker of recognition in his eyes. She might as well push it the rest of the way—they're already so far gone, and there's nothing else to lose. It'll be quick, at least. She tucks teal bangs behind her ear. "You need a haircut."

"You need a dye job," he croaks the words out unwilling, like he can't help them but wishes, god, wishes that he could. "Blonde doesn't suit you."

"Wow," Alex says, with a tinny little rumble in her chest that might be a breaking heart. She wants to say a lot of things. " _Rude_."

Jonas reaches up to thread his hands in her hair, pulls the ponytail out so that it falls around them in kinked-out chemical ocean waves that stain both their fingers. She's not even a little bit blonde, but hearing the words stings all the way through her.

He remembers. Oh, god, he has to _remember_ , because there's no way he'd say the exact same thing over again when there's no _basis_ for it, when her hair is still just fresh-dyed the colour of grief. There's no blonde anywhere, so he has to remember, and she just—oh, god. Alex cups her hands around his chin, tilts his head up, and moves close enough to watch his eyelashes tremble.

Mint and ash. Fear and want. Lightning sharp like poprocks in her mouth and just about as sweet, all laid out bare on his face. There are a lot of things that she knows, but they all wash away into white noise because there's nothing, _nothing_ like wanting something and being scared of the things it'll change and wanting it anyway. There's nothing like the way that Alex wants Jonas.

( _Yeah_ , she thinks, _love's nice_.)

Alex bends.

Kisses him.

It's such a little thing, so soft, butterfly wings or crepe paper or the softest thinnest silk. But Jonas gasps into her mouth like he's drowning, hands flexing around her thighs, all bare skin on bare skin. "Alex," he says, "I—"

[ _SCHTCCCHHH—oh, alex. when are you going to learn? you can't just_ _ **tell**_ _him. try_ _ **again**_ _. SKTCCHHHH—_ ]

"Really?" Alex asks her empty bedroom as her knees hit the aching floor. "Seriously?"

She waits for the old call and reply, waits for the radio in her pocket to burble children screeching laughter or forced applause or the high sharp crackle of static. The ghosts are a lot of things, but never quiet.

Alex waits.

But there's nothing.

Nothing at all.

—

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 _tbc_.


	7. just salt in the wound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i played GOETIA and honestly i need to stop playing video games about ghosts because it gives me ideas and like i have enough of those ok. i do not need to think about alex dragging jonas through time with her to go break curses and parlay with demons. WHO NEEDS THAT. NOT ME. AND YET. HERE WE ARE.

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As for me, I'm—

[ _—rewind; i'm getting tired, okay. can we stop for a while? alex? are you listening?_ ]

—

"Hey, let's take a picture!" says Ren. "It'll be like a—a before and after thing!"

Alex rolls her weight from foot to foot at the stern of the boat, eyes fixed on where the mainland's already receded into the gloom. The familiarity of the sentence bites the back of her eyes, before and after, as if there's even really such a thing. Time is a circle, and one of these days, she thinks she might fight it. Might see if she can't convince Ren and Jonas to stay, just to see. She'd thought that maybe this time—

But no.

There's been nothing.

Really, nothing. Not a peep out of the Kanaloa's crew, not a whisper, not a single flicker of anything out of the ordinary. No static, no laughter, no _nothing_.

Frankly, the silence is giving Alex the creeps. The lack of interference is a whole different kind of wrong; when she pulls out her radio to spin the dial, all she gets is empty frequencies. Searching for the eerie fifties jingles she's caught herself humming when she's not paying attention but not finding them is wrong. Waiting for the drip of rain and not hearing it is wrong. Even shrieking children's laughter, the blank-out of white noise, _anything_ would be better than this awful, wrong silence. Because it _is_ wrong, it's the _most_ wrong, and it oozes across her skin, creepy-crawly slime. It leaves her shuddering, breaking out in gooseflesh and rubbing at her arms, nails biting into her skin so hard she bleeds.

Alex isn't a masochist. She doesn't enjoy the way it leaves her trying so hard not to shake herself to pieces. She turns the collar of Michael's jacket up against the cold.

(God, she doesn't even know what she's trying to prove.)

Ren's babbling, yanking her closer in the dusky blue evening, soft swirl of mist around her fingers. He never remembers. She thinks of him with seaweed tight around his throat like a noose, and lets him reel her in.

"Here we go again," Alex murmurs as she smiles for the camera, but it really feels like a grimace. The words are more for herself than for either of the boys, but something—happens. The world _shifts_ ; that's the only way she can describe, a seasick tilt that doesn't belong to a stable universe. The whole thing throws her off-balance.

She keeps the grin on her face via sheer willpower and the hard grit of her molars.

"Cheese!" Ren hollers, and the flash goes off.

The picture is like this:

Alex, teal-haired with her lips pressed tightly together. Ren, grinning with all his teeth on display. Jonas, staring at Alex.

(Later, this will be the moment that Alex will pinpoint as the minute things started to really _change_. The pictures are static. They're always the same. But not this time, and it says something, but she doesn't know what.)

"Aw, guys, c'mon, this is _terrible_ —"

The ferry's horn bellows around them, cuts through the night and cuts Ren's tirade right off. It's not right to be thankful for it, but who cares what's _right_ anymore. Alex shrugs one shoulder at him like a crow, a sheepish kind of lopsided.

"We'll get a better one later," she says, even though she knows it's a lie. There won't be another photo of just the three of them. Not tonight, anyway. "But hey, look, we're here."

"Right," Ren says, nodding, less enthused than he should be. "Later."

The dock is solid under her feet as they disembark, old wood warped out weathered silver from sun and sea. _Don't think about it,_ Alex tells herself, and tries to ignore the weird push-pull prickle of déjà vu. _God, don't think about it_.

But Alex can feel eyes on the back of her neck, and she knows what comes next.

"Hey, Ren, can I talk to Alex for like, two quick seconds—?"

"It's okay, Jonas," Alex says, swallowing around a sudden lump in her throat. The funny thing is that no matter how many times she does this, it never really gets _old_. Yeah, it's not so scary anymore, and there's nothing surprising, but that doesn't mean—it's like muscle memory, okay? She can't just _stop_ , even when she wants to. Especially when she wants to. That's not the way this works. "I think I know what you're gonna say. It's—yeah, it's cool. Don't worry about it, I've got your back."

Jonas blinks at her, goes still all over, and they just kind of… _look_ at each other.

The moment hangs in the air like curdled milk, shatter-shard, and Alex wonders if maybe the ghosts got it right after all. There's something to be said for caring about someone so much that it burns. There's something to be said for caring about someone the way Michael cares about Clarissa. There's something to be said for caring about someone the way Maggie cared about Anna.

Alex thinks: _yeah, love's nice_.

"Oh-kay," says Ren, gaze flickering back and forth between them. "So about that there local sporting event—"

"No, Als," Jonas tells her, very, very slowly. "I really don't think you do. Seriously, I just need a couple minutes. We'll be right behind you, dude, I swear."

"I—are you—uh, okay, just—not too long, okay?"

Jonas grins. "No problem. We'll be right up."

It doesn't sound like a lie, but that's probably not a good thing.

"Als?" Alex asks, watching as Ren wanders up the hill. He's even worse than she is at trying to keep her cool; he keeps squinting back at them over his shoulder because he's the most terrible Orpheus in the history of forever, and it's way easier to concentrate on that than on Jonas on the pier with his hands stuffed into his pockets. There's only so deep she can dig her own grave before she hits rock bottom, and the ground is ringing solid beneath her feet. "Nicknames already? That was fast."

"Yeah," Jonas says. " _Als_. You don't have a brother, right?"

"Not really," Alex says, because she can't say _not right now_ and she also can't say _well there's you, right_ , because both those things are great big ugly lies, and if there's one thing Alex hates, it's lying to Jonas. "Not anymore."

"But you did," he says.

"Yeah," Alex says, thinking of the way her brother laughed just yesterday. The loss doesn't hurt the way it's supposed to. If there's anything that she's learned from all of this, it's that if you stare into the abyss, it stares back, and whatever you learn from it isn't worth what it takes in payment. The ghosts, the void, whatever you want to call it—they're sick, have taken and taken and taken, in blood and flesh and bone, but it's always worth it because she's pretty sick, too. "I did."

"His name was Michael, and I'm going to be living in his bedroom," Jonas' jaw clenches a little

"How do you know that," Alex says, very steadily. It's not a question.

"I don't _know_ ," Jonas says. "When we were on the ferry, something—I just knew. I dunno how."

"Okay," Alex says. "You are going to pull your cigarettes out, and we are both going to have one, and I'm going to cough up a lung and you aren't, and once we're finished, we're going to go find Ren and try not to be super weird, okay? Because, you know what, tonight's going to be weird enough and there's only so much weird I can handle in one night, alright? Clear? Good."

"How did you know I have smokes on me?" he asks, after a long minute.

"I just know, okay," she says, can't think of a lie fast enough to cover her tracks. Jesus, she used to be good at this.

"What, the same way I _just knew_?"

"Yeah, maybe! You always have cigarettes on you!"

"You can't know that, Alex. We haven't _met_ before," Jonas snaps.

"Yeah, well," she says. _We haven't met_ this _time_ , she doesn't. Her hands curl into fists, because nothing is fun and this isn't going to get her out the way it's supposed to. Jonas is staring at her with eyes like chips of flint, hard-edged and too bright in the greyed-out shadow of the streetlamp flickering down the street. God, she hates it when he looks like that. It makes her think of the ghosts, and the way they'd used him, _you know how we know, because we can be here for this long and_ _his soul is quiet as an empty church_.

Some things stick. Some things always stick.

"What do you want me to say, Jonas," Alex says. "Do you have a cigarette or not?"

Wordless, Jonas pulls out the pack he keeps in the inner pocket of his jacket. The lighter is a bright little spark in the night, lighting up the cup of Alex's palms golden-orange as she inhales. In the purple-dim of the late evening, she catches him watching her like something wild.

Alex exhales smoke, and doesn't cough at all.

Jonas watches her with steady eyes, watches until the cigarette in her fingers is ashed down to nothing. He doesn't light his own, just toys with the lighter, clear green plastic and the soundless slosh of flammable fluid beneath his hands. He shifts; it's the slow roll of a body unused to something, old muscles waking up. Awareness. _Awareness_.

"What do you remember, Als?" he asks, finally, so quiet.

Alex chokes, coughs until her eyes water. The smoke hisses around her, acrid with gaseous cancer. It's too early for this conversation. It's too late for this conversation, too. Shit, she is in _so much trouble_.

"Excuse me?" she manages around the burn in her throat.

"You heard me," Jonas says, and his voice is very level. He's staring at the smoke between her fingers. "I can't be the only one. I'm not crazy, I know I'm not. So what do you remember?"

The moment hangs between them for a very long time, suspended in the silence.

"Jesus, you have terrible timing," Alex says. "You couldn't have waited until later, Jonas? Really?"

"Answer the question, Als," he tells her.

_So. Much. Trouble_.

"Everything," she says and she doesn't let herself crumble because if she crumbles, so does everything else. Alex doesn't know how much of the reset relies on her keeping track of her feelings. Probably not too much, but the ghosts are still too quiet. She waits for the whispers, continues only when they don't creep into the crooks and cavities of her brain. "You?"

"Caves, and light," Jonas says, rolling the words around in his mouth. "Being pissed at Ren for—something, and lemme tell you, wanting to deck someone for no reason isn't a feeling I'm cool with. There was a really ugly chair. And you, when you smile."

"Caves," she murmurs. "Yeah, there are caves."

There is a lot more than caves on Edwards Island.

"We don't have to go down there," Jonas says. Alex doesn't ask whether or not he remembers what those caves lead to, because he has to. There's no other reason to bring it up, and their little spelunking adventure is pretty well burned into her brain for the rest of time. When she doesn't say anything in reply Jonas touches her, cuffs and elbows and the soft crease of her collar. She knows that he doesn't know where to put his hands. This closeness is like breathing a great lungful of air after being underwater too long, teetering on the edge of tumbling into real pain. God, she's such an addict. "We could just… not."

"You don't have to. But I do."

"Why?" asks Jonas.

"Because I can't let Michael stay dead. He's my brother. I can't—I just can't, okay. I can't," Alex says in a wretched whisper, and it's awful and shitty and she can't believe that this is the first time she's facing this, but of course it is: there's way too much emotion involved here for her to face it any other way. Edwards Islands is so many things, memories and bonfires and the actual, literal afterimages of people who used to be alive. But it also makes her honest. It makes them all honest; Ren wants Nona more loudly, Clarissa is crueler than she has to be because loss makes her mean, and Alex can't leave Michael dead even if it means she doesn't get to keep anyone else.

And Jonas is always going to be the only one who understands that because if it was his mom, he'd do the same.

Maybe that's why they fit: they're the same kind of selfish.

(Alex looks at her hands, and wishes that she was a better person. _Be better_ , she tells herself, _be smarter, be softer, be normal. Be normal, be normal, be normal_.)

And then Jonas does something she doesn't expect.

He laughs.

Alex looks up at him, peeking out through the dark fan of her lashes to blink owlishly at him. She doesn't know _what_ she expected, but it sure as hell wasn't laughter. It definitely wasn't the crinkle of his eyes, that weird little line through his forehead that she's teased him about before because it shows up any time they watch a scientifically-inaccurate movie because Jonas is actually a giant fucking nerd. It wasn't that—it wasn't _any_ of this.

"Oh my god, shut up," she grouses when he doesn't say anything, just keeps laughing. "It's _pathetic_ , not funny."

"It's not pathetic," Jonas says when he finally gets control of himself.

"Um, yeah, it kinda is," she tells him. There are tears sloshing behind her eyes, but there are always tears sloshing behind her eyes. Too on edge, maybe. There wasn't enough time before the reset, and adrenaline only lasts so long before real hysteria sets in. Alex is running on the dregs of herself, and she doesn't know much longer she can do it for.

"It isn't," he says, voice gone gentle. The sky is a sigh, and the air is numb. One of these resets, it's going to be too much.

(As though it's ever anything _but_ too much.)

"Yeah, okay," she says.

"Seriously, Alex."

" _Seriously_ , Jonas," she parrots.

Jonas looks at her for another long moment. "You okay?"

"I guess," Alex says, even though she really isn't. _Okay_ isn't something Alex really knows how to be, anymore. She knows anger, and fear, and fury. She knows apathy. She knows exhaustion.

But okay? No, not okay.

"C'mon," Jonas says. He grins out of the corner of his mouth, and Alex hates, hates, hates him. She hates that he remembers, maybe, or doesn't, or whatever this is. She hates that he _gets_ it. She hates that he's _rolling_ with it. It's not fair that he can just— _do_ this. Like it's nothing. Like it's everything. God. _God_. "Ren's waiting."

He turns to start heading up Main Street. The cut of his shoulders is weirdly lonely, and there's one, unfair minute where Alex wonders what it would be like to just go _fuck it_ and let the ghosts win. Maybe it's time. Maybe they all could just… rest, for a while. Maggie and Anna and Michael—maybe they should let the dead rest in peace. Maybe _Alex_ should let the dead rest in peace.

Alex thinks, _speak now or forever hold your peace_.

But he's right. Ren's waiting.

And Alex was never very good at leaving things alone.

She follows him, radio held tight in her fist like a weapon ready to go to war.

—

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_tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also i'm so sorry i'm so shit at replying to comments OTL


	8. oceans in the mind

—

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As for me, I'm—

[— _pause; didn't you ever learn to sit still?_ ]

—

The Towhee Woods are never quiet.

Even in this hellscape of night, there are birds chirping, the soft _shh-hh_ of the waves against the island's jagged edges, the haunting jangles of her nerves. And there is the human element, too.

Tonight, it goes like this:

"JESUS CHRIST, ALEX," Jonas squawks, voice echoing off the canyon walls.

Alex spins on her heel to look back at him, teeth a white flash in the night, and she waves brightly. Defying death continues to be thrilling in the way that only casually dominating gravity can be. Her heart bottoms out in her stomach, the wind's through her hair, and god, it feels like she can breathe for the first time in a hundred years. "Come on, it's not so bad if you run at it!"

"You are going to be the death of me!" he shouts after her.

"Probably!" Alex calls back, and it echoes between them: _probably, probably, probably_. "You coming?"

"I—what— _no_ , are you _crazy_?!"

"Probably!" she calls again, louder this time and laughing, dizzy from the rush and she very nearly collapses where she stands, swaying back and forth. The echoes double in on themselves until the night is nothing but a cacophony of her voice, _probably, probably, probably_ bouncing up into the sky.

Jonas stares at her across the gorge, gaping unattractively. Alex waves. She used to know how to do the flirting thing. Used to be good at it, even, but that was a long time ago. Before Michael drowned. Before the ghosts.

She waits for the wisps of giggle, phantom lips against her cheek, and comes up with nothing but an unnerving quiet.

(Alex suspects that Ana is the one forcing the silence. Alex suspects that Ana misses Maggie. Alex suspects a lot of things.)

"Well?!" she calls again.

"I hate you!" Jonas shouts, rolls his shoulders.

"No, you don't!"

Jonas grumbles something that she can't hear, and she watches his face. He goes very still when he's thinking seriously about something, and he does it now. It's all over him, the hunch of his shoulders beneath the leather of his jacket, the way he's got his hands shoved in his pockets. It's the slow roll of a body doing something unwilling.

They stare at each for too-long moments. Alex wonders what he sees.

(Here is what Jonas sees: a girl in a red jacket. A girl with blue hair. A girl who wears her mystery like a second skin, a girl who hides a lion inside her skin like a roar in her chest, a girl who drinks distilled nightmares for breakfast and comes out alright. She thinks she's broken but he's has been half in love with her since the first second he saw her, but he'll never tell her that. She's got enough to worry about, never mind his feelings.)

He makes the decision to jump just like he does everything else: solid and easy and following her lead whether he wants to or not.

He takes off the toque. It's actually kind of cute, all messy hair and sharp green eyes underneath. "If I die, I'm coming back to haunt you!"

"Get in line!"

The laughter chokes off. Alex opens her mouth to cheer him through it—

And he jumps.

There is a frozen moment of fear before Jonas hits the ground next to her like a wound in the world where she thinks he might not make it, and her heart stops in her chest. But he's tall and strong and when he scrabbles at the edge to pull himself up, Alex has never loved anyone so much.

She grins out of the corner of her mouth, reaches down to help him up. "Not so bad, see?"

Jonas makes a sound like a dying goat, clutching at his knees as he bends over panting. It is a very real sound! His pulse pounds in in his throat, and it is only adrenaline and the head rush from doing something stupid that keeps Alex on her feet. The gorge is different now that she's older: dangerous, deeper, darker. Once upon a time, her mother had told her a story about a great battle between the gods, Thunderbird diving into the ocean to pull Whale up onto land because Whale had been starving the people out, killing the other whales. The ocean receded and then rose again and the battle resumed; Thunderbird eventually won, but cleaved the ground apart in doing so, and the people were scattered.

Alex knows the story like she knows her bones. Looking down into the gorge's vertical drop makes her think of it, that endless consuming gloom. It sticks in her throat, in her ribs, and she remembers that this was sacred land, once.

But a genocide and a half later, it's only a haunted island that she can't quite escape no matter how hard she tries. There's something about the island that bites at the back of her eyes, but she can't put her finger on it. She thinks of the ghosts, and remembers: _part of a long and glorious history, Alex_!

God, there's something there, but _what_?

Alex turns her attention back outwards to the boy still gulping down air like he's drowned for it.

_Not funny, Alex_ , she tells herself.

"Not so bad," Jonas gasps, _gasps_ , gargling through the last syllable like he's got water in his lungs. "That—that was beyond bad, Jesus, I thought I was gonna die."

"I grew up doing that, you big baby," Alex says, sort of fond, sort of not. It's early enough in the night that things aren't so close, and the woods are still the kind of peaceful that all wild places tend to be when the sky unfurls brilliant with stars. She tips her head back, the ground so solid beneath her feet. "It's faster."

It's not, but whatever. Jonas stares up at her, hands still on his knees, his face flushed all the way down to his crew neck and further, down past the weird flappy lapel of his jacket. And for some reason, Alex thinks about Michael. About how he'd been the first to jump the gorge, fingers scrabbling over the skitter of pebbles down into the dark as he'd pulled himself up, crowing all the while. About drowning, and gauzy white sunlight in through the window, and the attic bedroom with the warped-out ceiling where the roof had sprung a leak.

Alex looks at Jonas and thinks of Michael, and wonders what part of herself she's going to have to sacrifice this time.

Her personality, maybe. Who knows, anymore.

"Are you okay?" Jonas asks, so quiet. He's pushed into standing, but there's still a flush to his cheeks. He looks at her, and Alex can feel it like a bad case of soul transference, the way it seeps out of him and sets her on fire instead.

"No," Alex says, because she's not, god, she's really fucking not, and pretending otherwise takes too much energy anymore. She can't count the number of times he's asked her that, _are you okay_ , always under his breath and out of the corner of his mouth and it's just—there are so many things that Alex wishes she could take back, but none of them are Jonas. "Are you?"

"Not even a little bit," he says, slinging an arm around her neck to drag her in close. Her mouth brushes his jaw. It's almost a kiss but not quite, so Alex doesn't think it'll count.

(It doesn't, and she chokes around the panic clogging up her lungs. What's the _point_ of starting again except to torture her? One day she's going to shatter, and there will be nothing left. The ghosts won't like that. _Alex_ won't like that.)

"Hey," she says, "you should probably lemme go."

"Probably," Jonas agrees, but he doesn't let her go at all. They stand there like closed parenthesis, two curled halves of a whole with arms around each other. Because that's the thing, isn't it, they're just like that, the beginning and the end without the middle to keep them apart. They're going to break into the radio tower and Alex is going to let him break down the door because it makes Jonas feel like she needs him, and then they're going to find Nona and they'll all be sick with each other, won't they, too hot and too close and way too damaged. All their stars will have gone out, and that'll only be the beginning. What is the future, when time is a circle?

"We have to go find Ren," Alex says into his shoulder, breathes in cigarette smoke and spice and unfamiliar laundry detergent.

"And Clarissa," Jonas says, not that Alex needs the reminder. The image of Clarissa falling flashes across her mind's eye, but never the aftermath. Alex doesn't know what a broken bone looks like, and god, she never wants to, but she can imagine, can imagine the sick jagged white and the dark slick blood and the _red_ —

Wow, morbid, that's enough of that. Dial it back, Alex.

"And Clarissa," she says, swallowing around sudden nausea. "C'mon, garbage snowman, we have to do this."

"One more minute isn't gonna hurt, Als," he says, and it's so _easy_ is the thing, Jonas makes it look so _easy_. And it's not like he's in it for himself, because god, he knows that she needs just one more minute to put herself back together; the only thing he ever asks for is his mom, and like. What even is that? Who even does that? He's so selfless that sometimes it's ugly.

"One more minute," Alex says, presses her face right back into his shoulder where it's beginning to feel like it belongs and gulps down air.

One minute becomes two becomes five. Five would become ten, but Jonas gently pulls away before they get there. For a minute, Alex wishes that adrenaline was something that could last—the laughter from earlier would definitely be appreciated right now, okay—because the comedown is always the killer, bleak and swift.

And the light in the Catbird Station is on. It's just up the stupid hill, a stupid blinking beacon in the stupid dark night. Ren's freaking out up there, Alex just knows it, because that's what Ren does. He freaks out.

Except about big things, like who she falls in love with and how she's totally dealing with her dead brother in a healthy way, i.e. not at all. He never freaks out about those things, which is unhelpful in every single way except all the important ones.

And falling in love is like the jumping the gorge, Alex thinks.

A great big breath of air into the lungs, legs pumping, flexing, pushing away from the earth—and then you're flying, and falling, and gravity inverts and there's the giddy rush of _what happens if I don't reach the other side_ —and then you hit the ground running, and you laugh until it hurts because you're alive. You're alive.

You're _alive_.

Alex looks up at Jonas, mouth pulling weird and wonky to one side, kind of like a fish. Probably looks like one, too, with her hair the way it is. His jacket's all crinkled and smeared with eyeliner from where she was not-crying into it and she smooths it out, the action a little like muscle memory.

"We're probably not gonna get out of here," she says, slowly, feels like a frayed hem or picking at a seam. A little thing, coming undone. "You know that, right?"

"Not this time," Jonas says. "Not unless I kiss you again."

"That's not _getting out_ ," Alex stresses, a line of poetry in her mouth: _I kissed you, I witched you, I laughed at the afterlife's dark_. Poetry was Michael's secret shame, his love and his sorrow because he was—is—actually a fucking nerd. Jonas isn't much better, if she's honest. Different flavours of it, but a fucking nerd is a fucking nerd no matter how you cut it.

"Then what is?" Jonas asks, raises an eyebrow at her. "Getting out, what's getting out?"

"Turning twenty," Alex says, _decides_. Turning twenty will be her benchmark, her sweet far thing, her base and her reach and her end fucking goal. Turning twenty won't be a celebration; it'll be a sigh of relief. Twenty will be an old beginning. She wants it so much that it could make her sick.

"You've never turned twenty?"

"Not once."

He doesn't ask how many times she's done this, which is good only because she doesn't really have an answer for him. Alex nudges her elbow into his side to get Jonas going, or maybe he nudges her, or maybe it's neither of those things. The timelines are beginning to blur. Blurring. Blurred.

_You have and you do and you will_ , whisper the ghosts for the first time all night.

A chill runs down Alex's spine.

Oh, _god_.

—

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_tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay uh. so. i'm wading into foreign territory here—the myth of Thunderbird and Whale is not anywhere close to my own creation; it's in the tradition of the Pacific Northwest indigenous tribes, and even though i HC that alex and michael are both full-blood Quileute who grew up with the stories—i'm an italian white girl. if i've said anything insensitive, spray me with cold water and tell me to shut the fuck up, okay? this isn't my sandbox, and i don't wanna overstep.


	9. strange things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes: again, if i've said anything shitty, spray me with cold water and hit me with a fucking stick.  
> notes2: [HOLY SHIT THERE IS ART](http://starchemist.tumblr.com/post/148319315636)????? i'm speechless and also still screaming like five days later W E E P S everyone go look at my beautiful bbs

—

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As for me, I'm—

[— _rewind; you can't go home, alex. not yet._ ]

—

"You know, I've been thinking," Alex tells the ghosts.

_That's never a good thing_ , they say, but it comes out mashed like a badly-rewound tape, sketching over the vowels, a twisted amalgamation of post-war propaganda and Clarissa's memories. It sounds like: _tht's nvr-ah ghd thhhg_.

Alex is used to it, understands it anyway even though no half-sane person would. She's listened to them so wound-up and wrung-out that there isn't a single mangled sibilant that she won't understand. _We were young once_ , she remembers, and sits on a little outcrop of rock right by the smallest cemetery and Jonas' prone body with her toes in the water, swinging her legs back and forth. It's not a bad loop, really. And the broken observation isn't wrong, so she allows it. "Yeah, not usually."

_So_?

"So what?"

_What were you thinking_?

"My mom used to tell me these stories," Alex starts off slowly, drops her head back. It's like one AM, the sky's so black it could put out a candle but for the starkle starkle twink of starlight, and she's settled down on the grassy slope outside of Maggie's mansion. The boat is right down by the water, but she stares through it unseeingly. No one should even be alive this time of night, never mind having conversations with dead people who want to like, eat your soul. "Myths, you know? The first people who built here were the Spanish, but they weren't the first people who _lived_ here."

There is a very deep silence.

"The long and glorious history," she tells them, lips twisting ugly around the words.

She'd not understood, at the start—there were anomalies and then there were _anomalies_ , and that had been an _anomaly_ —but of all of them, this one was… it was _personal_. Tailored. Meant for her in a way that the others hadn't been. And it didn't really make sense at the time, but Alex has gone through enough loops and played enough games that she gets it now.

Yeah, she gets it now.

"Point for Alex," she says when they don't answer, brushes teal-blue out of her eyes so that she can see them flinch. Satisfaction is a vicious emotion, and she hopes that Colonel Edwards rolls in his grave. "I didn't put it together until now, but a lot more people than just the Kanaloa crew are trapped here, right?"

_What makes you think that?_ they ask, and if Alex didn't know better, she'd say they sound hesitant.

"A lot of things," Alex says. She draws in the dirt the things that are burned into the backs of her eyelids: a submarine, radio frequencies, a soccer ball in impossible reverse motion. Lines, up and down, into a wave. Her nail catches against a pebble. "Four people at Cape Meares. The ranger who hung himself. And Jason sounds a lot like Jonas, doesn't it? Same letters, even."

Feedback's low warning _hum_ settles into her bones.

Alex, one; ghosts, a million. But one is better than zero, and now she's on a roll and she smiles kind of grim, continues. "Radio waves travel forever until they're absorbed by matter or a person. It's the anomalies, right?"

_Do not resist_ , they chatter out. It sounds like: _duh ntt ruhsst_!

"Oh my god, do not' _do not resist_ ' at me. You made me a Jonas. You tried to _bribe_ me with a _Jonas_ ," Alex retorts, glaring at the way the lantern-eyed shadow shifts. They don't abandon Clarissa's body so much as they _withdraw_ , hovering in the air behind and around her like a cloud even as they hold her still by a thread. "A copy. And not even a good one! Are you for real, man? Did you honestly think—"

_No_ , they say, a dark bubbling roil. _We didn't_.

She juts her chin out, eyes dark narrow slats in her face. It's hard not to think of that sticks-and-stones boy, starlight pouring out of his mouth, barely contained in the canvas of his skin. He'd blown away like he'd never been there at all because he was an unreal thing, rotted all the way through.

And Alex has never been in the business of trading away lives.

"You haven't told me I'm wrong," she tells them, almost pleasant.

_We—can't_ , they say. It's distorted, static-ey and cut through with white noise, but Alex makes it out.

"Why not?"

_Lies, soldier! It's not good to tell lies!_

"I guess not," she agrees, low and far away and quiet, thinking of the string of fairy-lights hanging above her head the first time Jonas had ever kissed her. It's a little funny because if he hadn't, she probably wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. It's a little funny because it's actually not funny, it's actually kind of sad, and she remembers something that she read once about how easy it is to divert the course of a river by moving just one pebble. Just one pebble, the right one pebble so that the water flows _this_ way instead of _that_ , and suddenly it's a different river entire.

(They don't call it the time-stream for nothing, Alex thinks, a little wry.)

Jonas picked the right pebble without even really worrying about it, and here they are. Figures.

"So I'm right," Alex finally says, turning it over and over in her mind. The Kanaloa crew are trapped, but so are the victims of Colonel Edwards' slaughter; family elders and mothers and fathers and children. Not to mention all of the other lives that the island's taken of the course of the last couple of hundred years, but that miniature genocide was the beginning. Whatever keeps the Kanaloa crew here is the same as what Colonel Edwards tried to kill.

_A great ethnic cleansing_ , the recording had said, and finally something else _clicks_ in Alex's head.

"That's why you can't keep me," she says, breathless with sudden realization. Her blood pulses in her veins and she looks down at her brown hands, her brown ankles, her brown knobbly knees beneath her jeans. "That's why you can't control me, isn't it? Why you can't _possess_ me like you do to everyone else. Because I'm—I'm _already_ part of that heritage."

The ghosts are as quiet as an empty church.

(They said that about Jonas once, _his soul is as quiet as an empty church_ , and Alex drew it into herself then, hating everything because it hit right too fast and too close right between the ribs. She kept it in her chest all this time, all these loops, awful and burning. She pulls it out, shoves it at them like a brand. Who's quiet as an empty church _now_?)

Because suddenly, suddenly so many things make sense.

Why they can't hold her. Why she keeps going back to the start. Why there was even a start in the first place; why Alex isn't out of place in her bright red jacket. Why her relationship with linear time is tenuous at best, and why sometimes the island feels like home in a way that nowhere else does. Why even when she says _take me instead_ —and god, she's said _take me instead_ so many times—the world still resets. Alex never wanted to be a martyr, and so she isn't.

"Go ahead, have me," only works when they actually _want_ you.

And it's not like the ghosts don't know that; they just don't want to be forgotten. The universe is an empty void that'll eat you alive if you let it. It's the space between seconds, lives half-lived, sailing away across stars and being trapped beneath a hundred metric tonnes of seawater.

People are always dying, but this is different.

This is _personal_.

"People died on this island," Alex says, "and you can't control me because they _are_ me."

The ghosts breathe in.

Alex thinks: _yeah_. It always does come down to the blood. It's not like it was for Maggie and Anna, because neither Maggie nor Anna really belonged to this place; the radio school was just another offense in a long line of offenses, the Kanaloa explosion just more blood spilled, and so Maggie didn't get to save Anna.

But Alex gets to save Jonas.

Alex gets to save _Michael_.

She kind of raises her head to look at them, a little up and a little to the left, but looking at the ghosts is _hard_. They don't—really have a face? A seething black mass of glowing eyeballs isn't really a thing anyone wants to be, but especially Alex. There are only so many times a person can handle the implosion of everything they've ever known and loved before they break for good. Alex doesn't look at Clarissa, because Clarissa can be awful, but she doesn't deserve this.

No one deserves this, not even the ghosts.

"Look," Alex says,

_Sit still. Bear fruit_.

"You know I can't. It won't work. We're just gonna keep doing this, but we're not getting anywhere. It's gotta stop, man, this isn't healthy for anyone!"

_Alex_ …

They look at each other for a long time, girl and ghosts echoed back and forth over the four bodies between them. It's a spectrum: from Jonas to Ren to Nona to Clarissa, and Michael out of time just as much as Alex is. The ghosts don't want to leave, but they don't want to stay, either. It's scary!

Alex breathes in. She has one more card to play.

"Do you really want to do the same thing to me that Colonel Edwards did to you?" Alex asks them, even as she wonders if they've even thought about it like that. _Treat people the way you want to be treated_. It was drilled into her as a kid by teachers and parents; anyone she respected liked to throw it around when she went down kicking and screaming, and Alex went down kicking and screaming more than she likes to think about. It's stupid because that's not how it _works_ , that's not how it works by a long shot, but it's—it's something.

And Maggie's notes had said that the ghosts had regressed to something like childhood, a place where games make sense when nothing else does. Alex gets it, has seen it and lived it herself. The ghosts want to _play_ : they don't want to be forgotten. And the fifties were even _more_ sugar-coated sweet than she likes to give that decade credit for. Radio waves and ear-worm soup-can jingles; of _course_ they're going to want to play games, they don't know anything else.

A brittle old proverb, shitty as it is, might actually do the trick.

(Alex thinks of Hangman scribbled out on a chalkboard, and handprints, and the anomalies—how many people have died here? How many? How many was she _related_ to?)

_No_ , the ghosts murmur, flickering in and out. They're in the in-between space, neither all the way into the world nor sunk back into the void. The gates shimmers behind them, flashes the ocean floor, flashes the explosion, flashes a blood-soaked beach and sunshine off the water.

Alex doesn't ask them why they're doing it. She gets it, really, seriously, she does. She gets the whole, like, _thing_.

No one wants to disappear. No one wants to be forgotten. Time is unforgiving, and dead is dead is dead.

"Do you honestly think I'm _ever_ gonna stop thinking about you?"

_You did_ , they say, _before_.

Alex doesn't deny it. She did forget, or she was starting to, at least.

Before.

But that was then and this is now, and Alex knows her own self. She knows her own self and she knows the ghosts, and she knows the anomalies. She knows the stories and the games, because all those things make up who and what she is. She's cut herself to pieces, made herself unreal, but maybe it's time to stop that.

"You can't have my friends. They're dumb and sorta awful, like, most of the time. But I love them. I'm not going to give up," Alex tells them, stomach dropping to her toes and mouth pulling weird because she's said that before, she knows she has. She can't say it's quite a frown, even as the loop destabilizes and begins to make that sketchy badly-rewound-tape, nails-against-chalkboard sound. It claws across Alex's ears, and she grits her teeth.

_We know_ , they say, and that's different because it's not _neither will we_ , which is kind of standard, at this point.

The loop shatters.

Reality falls away, and Alex opens her eyes to the dark.

—

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_tbc_.


	10. until dawn (no one you know)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to @ **cola** , who is cute.
> 
> also this is like. really weird? i'd say i'm sorry, except that i'm actually not. OXENFREE as a whole is kind of really weird, so.

—

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As for me, I'm—

[ _SCKTCHHHHHCHHHHHH—uh, hello? um. is anyone. is anyone there? uh, um. oh, jesus. alex? alex, can you hear me? it's, uh, it's alex. listen—SKTCHHHHHHHTTTSHHHCKK_ —]

—

"Seriously?" Alex says, unsmiling into the dark.

The dark doesn't respond.

"You know, I should have expected this," she tells the dark aloud. It's a matte kind of dark, flat and all-encompassing, so thick Alex thinks she's not even breathing air anymore because it's not like any kind of dark she's ever seen before. It's not like nighttime dark, shot through with starlight and leavening greys. And it's not like inside dark, the dark that's soft and warm and safe, the dark that rocks a person to sleep. It's just… _dark_.

But she's sitting on something, so there must be ground and there must be _something_ above her head. Darkness isn't nothing, but it's not _not_ nothing, either. Jonas is gone, but he's always gone. Alex has never asked him what he's found on the other side of those tape recorders, or if he even remembers it at all. Maybe that's something to talk about when they get out of this. Maybe there are a lot of things to talk about when they get out of this.

_If_ they get out of this. The ghosts don't really want to play with anyone else. And why would they? They have Alex, they have their loops, they have hangman and handprints and the whole entire universe in the great gaping chasm of their mouths. They pull her back through the radio waves, sure as the tide. They pull her back, sure. They _pull_ —

But whatever.

Alex can't stay here, wherever here is.

(God, she's so fucking tired. Sometimes, though, she thinks that they get it. This whole time, the temporal shifts have been… different. Alex thinks about Maggie and Anna, and then about Jonas. And the ghosts are a lot of things, but in this they're right. _Yeah, love's nice_.)

She's a little wobbly as she gets up, knees cracking sickly beneath her as she moves. Alex stretches herself out, jeans a worn-soft scratch against her thighs, feels like she's shaking off an aeon. Time is so weird. If it's ever consistent again, she's calling shenanigans and getting the hell out while she still can.

It probably won't be, though.

Alex wanders for a long, long time in the dark.

"Mike" she calls. "Jonas? Is anyone there?"

No reply. Just an echo: — _nas—nas—nas—_

"I guess not," she mutters under her breath. She looks down at her hands, which she can see perfectly clearly. The laws of physics don't seem to apply here; light, reflection, refraction—

_Thud_.

"I'm—oh, oh my god," Alex says, when she gets her bearings. They've both gone sprawling, head over heels, the bend of knees and elbows and knuckles all akimbo. Alex struggles to sit up with the wind knocked out of her, struggles to get it back a second time when she finally gets a good look at whoever it is she's knocked into.

She knows that face. She knows those eyes. She knows that _nose_.

(The nose knows, she hears Michael say. Useless, Alex thinks.)

_Oh my god, that's me_.

"Okay," Alex says, staring at—herself? Her reflection? Her… other self? There are no words to accurately reflect this—the girl, blinking owlishly as they kind of awkwardly help each other up while desperately trying to avoid touching one another. "This is—I mean—I have seen weird, okay, but this is like. This is like a whole other level? I—I don't—what is going _on_?"

"I dunno," says the other Alex—god, there's _another_ Alex, what the hell, this is such a _trip_ —sort of shrugs and does this thing with her face that Alex knows that she does, too. It's so weird, it is _so weird_ to watch the way the pattern of freckles scrunches; Alex knows it only flipped in the mirror, but seeing it in glorious real-life technicolour motion is a whole other ballpark. "Are we—are you—you're me, right? You have to be. Why is your hair blue?"

"It's teal," Alex says automatically, and that's when it registers: other Alex still has brown hair.

Other Alex still has brown hair.

The dye had been a rebellion, a revolt, a red waving flag in a bull-fighter's ring. It had been Alex telling her mother that no, this isn't something she was going to accept and no, it was _never_ going to be okay. It had been an outward expression of inward grief, like the ocean of salt and rust that had engulfed her when Michael drowned had leaked out of her and tainted everything awful. The dye job had just made sense at the time, _still_ makes sense if Alex is really honest about it but—

Jesus, _other Alex still has brown hair_.

And then it's all the other little things that are incongruous; other Alex is half an inch shorter. Other Alex is still wearing those friendship braid-bracelets that Ren learned how to make two summers ago, but Ren has no sense so the things are neon green and puke orange and they're new enough that the colour has bled out of them yet. Other Alex is wearing the scuffed pair of high tops that she'd lost in the lake. Other Alex isn't wearing Michael's jacket.

Alex thinks: _oh, you're still Alexandra_.

It'll have to do.

(Here is something that Alex has never told anyone: the schism between _Alex_ and _Alexandra_ was a cataclysm, submerged and reaching for Michael's hand and just, just, _just_ missing his fingertips. Sunlight through water, stale oxygen in her lungs, fear a sudden paralysis locking up her throat. Here is what Alex has never told anyone, what Clarissa has never understood: when Michael drowned in the lake, so did Alexandra.)

"I bet Mom hates it," Alexandra says. She stares with a kind of sick fascination. Yeah, Alex knows what that's like.

"Yeah," Alex says, which isn't the case at all; her mother doesn't care anymore. She's far too busy on her honeymoon with Jonas' dad or so pleased that Michael's decided to stay home for college that she doesn't have the energy to scold Alex about what is a relatively harmless life choice in the big scheme of things.

They walk side by side, and Edwards Island materializes around them in impressions, in shadows. It's all muted down, the colours dimmed nearly to perdition. It's all nothing. And then nothing blooms into Main Street, Main Street into Epiphany Fields, Epiphany Fields into the beach with its frozen shores and its crackling fire.

It would be weird, but Alex's scale for _weird_ is pretty much broke, at this point. And when she turns, Alex catches a gleam of red in Alexandra's eyes.

_Oh_ , she thinks, _**there**_ _you are_.

(Because the ghosts can't leave her alone, even here, even now. Maybe she is trapped in the void. Maybe she's becoming exactly what they are—maybe she's losing her mind, and Jonas is on the outside of it all, waiting. Or maybe not.)

When they reach the cave mouth, Alex and Alexandra, it's like time has… _stretched_. Clung, somehow, wrapped its knotted strands around them both. The weight of the combined lifetimes weighs heavy on their shoulders, and they slump together in front of the fire.

"Hey," Alexandra says.

When Alex looks at her, she's not surprised to find that her hair has bleached out to teal, that the thin fabric of her shirt has bulked out into the heavy folds of Michael's jacket. That's the nature of the island, really. Complete chaos when it's happening, but in hindsight, it makes a twisted kind of sense. Even the empty space behind the sky has rules to follow. And now Alex and Alexandra are the the only real thing left, the pair of them sitting together in their bright red jackets, mirror images and foils and perfect fucking complements. "What's up?"

"Do you really wanna leave? I mean… is it really so bad here?" Alexandra asks, so quiet. She's drawing radio waves in the sand, up and down and up and down. It's an unconscious thing. If the ghosts are inside of her, they're not doing a very good job of hiding it.

Alex tips her head back to look at the sky. A sky without colour is a flat experience, and she'd never realized how much she'd relied on it being painted right until all those dyes leached away. The stars are pin-pricks of white, but they're just as still as everything else. Ghosts, fire, cold beer in the cooler. There's nothing alive.

"Do you remember when Michael died?" Alex asks, instead of answering.

"Yeah," Alexandra says. She pulls in a whistling breath through her teeth. "It was awful."

"Really was," Alex agrees, because, god, burying her older brother was the worst thing she ever did, and no one is ever going to understand that. Not Clarissa. Not Mom. Not even Jonas. "This is worse than that."

"Why?"

"Because it keeps _happening_ ," Alex tells her, shifts over a little so that Alexandra's head doesn't dig into her shoulder at such a crappy angle. They both settle. "And I'm done, man. I wanna go home."

Alexandra nods with her eyes closed, doesn't say anything.

Alex thinks that there are very few things more strange than sitting on the beach with your former self's head on your shoulder. Or maybe it's her future self. Time is a circle, riding the radio waves into eternity, over the crests and into the valleys, crooks and crags that history forgot.

The point is, there is _nothing weirder_.

But—

"I'd do it all over." Alex says out loud.

"What?" Alexandra asks. She's a fading thing, beginning to blend in with the empty beach.

Absently, Alex reaches over to tuck her bangs out of the way. Do they always look so dumb? She needs to do something about that. "The island, the ghosts… everything. I mean, it sucks, and some of it was, like, so unnecessary? Like, the handprints! That was _so_ unnecessary! And uncomfortable? But I'd—yeah, I'd do it again. I guess."

"For real?"

"Yeah," Alex says. She thinks of Michael. She thinks of Jonas. Remembers that she doesn't get to have them both, and that that was what started this whole thing in the first place. She doesn't get to have them both, even though she wants them. The universe has weird laws, and that's kind of one of them. Clarissa will always end up possessed. Jonas will never remember. Ren will always like Nona. And Michael will always, always come back from the dead.

"Okay," Alexandra says a little slurred. Nods. "That's good. M'tired, sorry 'Lex."

"Don't worry about it," Alex tells her. "You can sleep. I'm not going anywhere."

Alexandra grins at her kind of droopy, eyes half-closed. For some reason, Alex thinks of the ghosts' star-boy. Alexandra isn't the same at all, but there's an underlying similarity that turns all of Alex's insides to glass.

There was an extra Jonas. Of course there's an extra Alex.

"Hey," Alexandra exhales. She's almost all the way gone, the teal in her hair turning dark again. Her mouth curls up a little, a merry lantern glow finally beginning to coalesce behind the eyes. She looks like a street lamp, warm and safe to guide a person home. "Hey, Alex…"

"Yeah?"

"I'll say hi to Anna for you, 'kay?"

"'Kay," Alex says. Alexandra shimmers like a heat mirage. Something very tight inside of Alex goes very loose instead, and she doesn't try to hold on. Forwards or back, time is finally beginning to move again. "I'll say hi to Maggie."

She doesn't expect a reply, because there's nothing there.

Alexandra is gone.

—

Alex opens her eyes to pale pink dawn and way more shouting than there should be.

"Jesus, would you just—!"

"Back off, dude, you don't even _know_ my sister—!"

"Except I—Alex, can you tell your brother to shove off and let me hug you?!"

"God, shut up, you guys are so loud," Alex says, voice crumbling away. She feels like she's slept an aeon. She feels like she's turned to dust. It takes more effort than she's willing to admit to push herself into sitting, and that's not right, Michael should be hovering over her and Jonas—

Jonas shouldn't remember.

Alex takes a great big gulp of air, swallows down the abyss inside of her because hope is such a dangerous emotion. "Jonas?" she croaks. "Jonas, do you—?"

The next thing she knows, there are solid arms around her, a wide pair of shoulders, the familiar cologne of cheap cigarettes and laundry detergent. Jonas holds her so tight that all of her ribs creak. She's going to be bruised all over and she's not even going to be mad.

"It's you, it's you, it's you," Jonas is saying over and over. Like a mantra. Like a prayer. _It's you, it's you, god, I'm so glad it's you_. "Jesus, Alex."

"Fuck you," Alex hiccups into his shoulder. She can't even breathe. "You smell like smoke."

"Yeah, yeah, it's gonna kill me," Jonas says into her hair. He sounds scratchy, like he's been yelling too long. Maybe he has. "Als, I _remember_. My head's weird, but I—are you okay?"

Something inside of Alex breaks.

(It feels like this: a tipping point, a cracked radio, a hairpin turn. It's a breaking, but it's a breaking _out_. It's escaping a cage. It's starting over. All of the shattered things inside of Alex crystallize because it's nothing but it's also everything. Dichotomies, triangles, an open blast door. That's what it feels like.)

God, he _would_ ask if she was alright, _wouldn't_ he?

Jonas is always Jonas, no matter the timeline.

"Yeah," she says, and slips her arms around his neck to hug him back just as tight. She doesn't cry, even though it hurts. It's a good hurt, hard and bright, and Alex hasn't felt many of those. She presses her face into his neck. Breathes in. Breathes out.

Breathes.

"Yeah," Alex says again, nodding. _Jonas_ , she thinks, _Jonas_. "I'm good."

—

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_tbc_.


	11. the beginning after the end

—

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As for me, I'm—

[— ** _.. .----. -- / --- -.- .- -.-- .-.-.- / -.-- . .- .... --..-- / .. .----. -- / --- -.- .- -.-- .-.-.-_** ]

—

"Hey."

"Oh. Hi."

"Can I sit?"

"You really have to ask?"

"Don't wanna intrude."

"I don't even think that's possible, man," Alex says, mild, tipping her head back just enough to look up at him. There's something to be said for this, sitting out here on the dock with the rising sun streaming through the morning mists. Edwards Island is a ghostly pale imitation of itself—haha, ghostly, that would be funny if it weren't quite so sad—looming in the distance, the crumbling remains of the radio school buildings jutting into the sky like stumpy, broken-off teeth.

It's a good analogy, actually. Once upon a time, that island ate everything good inside of Alex, ate and ate and ate, and now there's nothing left. Buildings for teeth, the maw of the cavern for a mouth, the great hollow inside the cave for a stomach. Like being in the hard beating dark of the beast, swallowed, disappearing into nothing.

Yeah, it works.

Jonas sits.

He's weird and out of sorts, kind of hunching over. The leather of his jacket rumples when he shifts, a little, avoids touching her. And Alex gets it, she's not always been great at telling him _god, you don't even know how much I need you, please don't leave me alone right now_ , but that's because the words all get stuck in her throat until it feels like she might as well be chewing on broken glass.

The ghosts made Alex unreal.

Becoming real again was difficult, and things are just… hard, sometimes. That's all.

"It's been a year," Jonas says, so casually. He's staring out at the horizon, mouth an expressionless line, eyes something fierce. He'd looked like that for a long time after the island, too, Alex thinks, like he was daring the world to come at him, to come at _them_.

He's right, though.

It's been a year.

"Yeah, I know," Alex says, because she does know.

"Do you think it's gonna…?"

"I dunno," she says. The word _reset_ hangs heavy in the air between them, and Alex won't say it for fear that it'll happen. There have been nights and nights and nights that she's jumped at shadows, held her breath just a little too long, fingers shaking around the neck of a beer bottle because god, if they go back now, if they go back now there's going to be no coming back at _all_. "A lot happens in a year."

Jonas looks at her out of the corner of his eye. "You haven't turned twenty yet."

Alex's lips quirk. "You did, though."

For a second, they both sit there and think about that party, the slow hot roll of a house too full of people all drunk and laughing beneath the twinkle of fairy lights. Ostensibly it _had_ been Jonas' birthday party, but Ren and Michael are such a ridiculous combination that they should never be allowed to plan anything together ever because it always ends with someone passed out on the floor covered in glitter. If Alex didn't love them both so much that sometimes she can't stand it, she'd question why she even puts up with their shenanigans.

(Alex remembers: _God, Ren,_ another _brownie?_ and then Ren throwing himself across the room to wrap his arms around Nona's waist to complain into her throat that they were being so _mean_ to him, and Nona flushing because she'd still not been used to Ren's _everything_. Clarissa's mouth had been a fond red bow every time she glanced over at Michael, curling into a smirk when her gaze skittered over where Alex was tucked into Jonas' shadow. That had been the last time they'd all been together, and now it hurts to think about. God.)

"Yeah, let's never talk about that again," Jonas says, a little wry. The discomfort has bled out of him, left him lounging easy at her side. It could be any day at all, the pair of them out here like this.

"What, every single party we've ever gone to?" Alex says.

Jonas laughs, a little too hard, a little too sharp. It's only funny because it's true. After—after everything, some things just don't matter anymore. Parties, and bad days, and other people; they just don't… _matter_. "Yeah," he says, "that."

Alex grins, nudges her elbow in to his side. "It wasn't _my_ idea, man, I had nothing to do with it. Blame Ren. The silly string was _his_ contribution."

"You didn't discourage him."

"Where's the fun in that?" Alex says, and the grin quirks farther, pulling up into a real smile on the tipping point of turning into laughter. She nudges him again and he nudges her back and then they're squabbling good-naturedly, back and forth with elbows and knees and all the sharp points of each other, and it's so dumb and so totally _normal_ that it just—it just—

It hurts and it doesn't, but no one else _gets_ it like Jonas does.

She ends up sprawled halfway across him, knees thrown over his thighs, hair come down out of its ponytail to trail a messy teal wave across them both. It's getting long again, bleaching out slow until there's not much teal left at all. The colour went away like the sadness, so slowly that she'd not realized it had gone at all until one morning she looked up and not everything was grey.

Jonas tugs on the ends of her hair like he knows exactly what she's thinking about. "Need a dye job?"

"As much as you need to stop smoking," Alex tells him, even though they've had this conversation before a hundred times. She thinks about beer bottles and fairy lights, this place that they've been and never been and always will be. Parties and bad days and people, and everything else in-between.

"Ow," Jonas snorts. "My feeling."

"Only the one, because the smoking's killed the rest," Alex snips at him, pokes him between the ribs just to watch him squirm.

"Wow, since when are you mean?" Jonas raises his eyebrow at her. She has to squint to see him right, burning white in the sunlight. It's nice. "Is Clarissa rubbing off on you? Do we gotta stage another intervention?"

"That was once, and you're just mad that I took Nona to prom and you had to go stag with Ren—!"

Jonas makes like he's about to shove her off and into the water, and Alex shrieks and clings. It's June and the water's warm but it's not _that_ warm. If she's going in, so is he—her arms lock and linger like an octopus, biting down on the laughter to keep from disturbing the neighbours. Jonas swears under his breath, nearly knocks them in trying to get her off.

Alex laughs and laughs and laughs, and doesn't let go.

When they finally stop, all their bones turned to jelly from the thrill of fighting over something that doesn't matter, they both kind of go lax. It takes them ten minutes to settle down, and when they're done, Alex finds Jonas bent a lot closer than she's used to.

"Hey," she says, blinking up at him.

"Hi," Jonas says, eyes turning soft. His hand tangles in her hair.

They haven't—they haven't touched each other, not really. Maybe it's just trepidation, or not wanting to upset things, or maybe even just a case of speak of the devil: they've avoided getting too close because god, if they get burned again, it's not going to be alright. Alex doesn't think she can survive another reset. She doesn't think she handle losing something else.

But there's Jonas and there's the sun, and the ghosts can't control her forever. Alex won't _let_ them control her forever. The took up Maggie's whole life, and Anna's, and their own; she's not going to forget, because forgetting isn't something that's on the table anymore. They made sure of that, and a promise is a promise. She won't forget, and they won't drag her back. A trade-off.

Jonas smells like skin and soap, and Alex wants. God, she _wants_.

She winds her hand into the neckline of his t-shirt, drags him down. It feels like sinking through the ground, like being pulled down into the dark and the safe, always somewhere else. He's freckled all over, she's tracked them all spring and all summer, had them stuck in her head when nothing else stayed. Michael's going to run off after Clarissa because of course he's going to, Alex learned her lesson, she doesn't get to have them both. One brother, one—whatever Jonas is. That's the way it goes.

And maybe that's okay.

Maybe it's okay.

"Alex, are you sure?" he says, forehead creasing into worry beneath his fringe. She almost misses the stupid beanie. "What if—shit, what if—"

"Jonas," she cuts him off.

"Yeah?" he says, staring at her wide-eyed. She thinks: _what are you doing_ , and watching as one by one the stars faded above them. Stars, starboys, boys with canvas for skin and rot for insides, the ghosts and the gambles and the games. God knows, they've lost enough. God knows, there's nothing else to lose. God knows, there's _so much_ to lose.

"Please shut up," Alex says, not unkindly, and closes the inch of space between them.

Jonas' mouth tastes like cigarettes and mint toothpaste and time, if time has a taste. He tastes like the loops, cutting his teeth on the edge of a temporal shift, like campfire smoke and late nights and the fizzy _pop_! of carbonation. Alex makes a tiny sound at the back of her throat, bare knees scraping against the dock, silver and soft as she curls her body into his. They've always taken turns, and this is no different; Alex kisses Jonas, and they both should be bad at it but they aren't. It's not the first time, after all.

Alex doesn't know how long they kiss, mouths easing together, sharing the same air. It might be a minute, or an hour, or several sunlit days. It might be a year. It might be no time at all.

But here is what she will remember:

Morning sun on her shoulders, the _slop_ of waves against wood, the scratch of stubble against her cheek. Blunt fingers digging into her waist, the curve of a collarbone, hair in her mouth as she tries to gulp down air. Dizzy. Shaky. _Hungry_. Aching all the way down to the core of her. Warm skin, rasp of denim against denim, close but not close enough, never close enough—

For a long time, they just sit there, pressed together.

Waiting.

But nothing—nothing happens.

Nothing happens at all.

(Her stomach doesn't drop out, her hands don't clench, the laughter doesn't start. There's nothing but the quiet and the sun burning away the morning mists. Here and now, Jonas under her hands and holding her down like an anchor. She doesn't know how long she's been waiting. She didn't think she was ever going to stop. But here it is: the denouement, the release, the end. The beginning after the end.)

"Als," Jonas says eventually, a gentle wash of concern in his voice. "Hey, you're crying."

Alex doesn't open her eyes, doesn't reach up to wipe away the tear tracks down her cheeks. She just stays where she is, tucked into the warm cave of Jonas' chest, face in his shoulder, golden morning sunshine dripping down her shoulders. Mouth tingling, relearning its own shape in the wake of learning Jonas'. And breathing. Not waiting for the other shoe to drop, the way they've both maybe secretly been because sometimes you can't _help_ the waiting, but just—just breathing.

After everything, Alex and Jonas, just breathing.

"Yeah," she says, at last. "I am."

—

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_fin_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey kids, thanks for sticking with me through this. it's been cool. ♡♡♡

**Author's Note:**

> look you can say whatever you want but there was n o t h i n g platonic about this relationship b y e


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